“I’ve been asking you to do it for weeks”, my mother told me trying to be authoritative but instead sounding shaky and whiny.
“Fine, I won’t go see my friends and I’ll clean my room which you don’t even have to go in”, I shot back. I walked up the three stairs into my bedroom and plopped down on my insanely comfortable bed. This was a day I had woken up early for, specifically because I was driving 30 minutes to see friends I never saw. I was about to explode with personal information that I could see my other friends I saw often judging heavily which is why I was going to drive all that way. My mom saying she wasn’t 100% behind me going was a guilt trip waiting to happen and I couldn’t stand the thought of condemning myself to that. I lay on my bed and my ADHD brain started spinning rapid fire.
I was determined not to clean my room so I lay back and procrastinated as much as I could. I stared at the ceiling and thought about the youth that the pieces of tape that once held my pictures and magazine articles brought to my room. The ragged edges of paper still stuck like an insect in a spiders web. In limbo, caught in the in between of being a whole picture that has a voice and tells a story and a piece of paper not saying much at all except for expressing the change in an adolescent's life. Expressing the hope and childhood that has been put away and slowly outgrown. I remembered how my pictures used to fill every square inch of my ceiling and walls, my ribbons from rock climbing used to hang from my ceiling in a clump with the first place ribbon in the middle of all the 5th and 6th place ones telling everyone that when I got 1st it was a total fluke. My inspirational quotes from 17 magazine made it through the purge and still bond with their pieces of tape which bonds to my mirror. Words like beautiful, summer and petite. My pictures telling their own story of my past and how I was as a small child. Me with family friends, me with cousins and aunts and uncles. My parents and I from when they (and I) were much, much younger. That stage of my adolescence was over and packed into boxes under my bed. I knew that they would always be a part of me, a cluttered, harebrained, smiling kid who wanted to be surrounded by memories of the people she loved and even the mistakes she made. I put up notes that had been passed back and forth between me and my best friends telling me they could no longer be my friends. At the time it was a stab in the back, but it was now what made me, me. I had been to Hell and back which made me stronger than I looked. I knew, although I would never admit it, that I was a pretty fantastic, warm ray of sunshine despite everything.
I looked around and thought about all the bumper stickers I plastered on my bed. All of them having to do with rock climbing or slacklining, reminding me of my ex-boyfriend and the world I introduced him to that was still holding us both. The nail polish I used to write my name on the edge of my bedframe in turquoise and magenta when I was 12 to make my mark. The owner of the gym where my second home is, purchased the bed at Ikea probably over a decade ago. He gave the bed to a co-worker who gave it to me when she moved to Arizona. It’s been in our (the gym’s) family forever and I don’t intend on giving it up.
My eyes fell onto my bear from build-a-bear that I cleverly named “bear.” Bear was sitting on top of a bright green couch along with my other stuffed animals that I would always cram into my bed because I didn’t want any one of them to feel left out. My collection include my other build-a-bear creation that I made with my friend, and Peter, the bear given to me by another friend sophomore year on Valentine’s Day. We didn’t have Valentine’s ourselves so we decided to be each others. I thought of those relationships and how they had both almost fallen through. By a stroke of luck they are better than ever now and I reflected on how grateful I still am for that. Being in a “grateful” mood my frustration toward my mother softened and I thought, “she feeds me, clothes me, and has put up with me for 17 years. I want to clean my room for her now.”
The first stop in my room was the closest thing to me. Being lazy it just logically went like that. My nightstand needed some desperate attention. I started grouping together glasses to take into the kitchen and putting deodorant back in the bathroom. I put receipts in my receipt box and put the cans in the recycling. Under everything, I found paper clips. Three of them. The edges bent to an angle of accusations. Saying so much for being an inanimate object. Immediately conveying the past, telling a story and painting a picture of who I used to be. Touching that paper clip sparked a want in me that I didn’t know I had. A desire unlike anything else which scared me so badly because what it wanted went against the last year of my life. That want contradicted my recovery and made me question who I had become. My thought process flipped around and instead of “I don’t need to” it went to “Who would it be hurting? Just myself so why am I not fulfilling my desire when it is so simple, slash the sharp edge across my wrist and see the blood. Then I will be satisfied.” But I thought of all the people I would be letting down, all the people who believed in me, who brought me food to replace the nasty stuff the hospital gave us. Taking a deep breath, I turned on my heel with the paper clips in my hand, walked over to the clear plastic garbage bin and tipped my hand, watching my old life fall beside the gum wrappers and plastic from my new copy of the Mean Girls DVD.
Clearing the first layer off of my nightstand had uncovered another layer, a secret cavern of stuff. Next to the paper clips and under the cans I found my failed driving tests, crumpled up into little balls of crushed dreams. Two months ago I was so upset that I would not drive past my ex-boyfriends house and brag that I had gotten my license while he totaled his car and got his license revoked (he was fine). Make one or two or maybe three drive bys because even though I had broken up with him, I was still hopelessly in love with him. I passed on the third try so those drive bys became a reality eventually. I wanted to show him how good I was doing, how I got my license and I was okay. I had wanted to drive myself to work in the morning when I worked with kids for 8 hours a day for ten weeks this summer and treat myself to a piece of pie from Fat Apple’s and a Caramel latte from Starbucks in the plaza because that is what adults do. Adults just seemed to know as sharply as a steak knife that they have the ability to do the little things without the judgment of others except for the strangers who don’t even know who the pie is for anyways.
My nightstand was orderly enough so I moved on to the floor. I found about 5 stacks of 8 books each. They were a compilation of books I had borrowed from friends, leaving them on the floor forgetting that they needed to be returned, and my own books that I had bought and blown through like an afternoon breeze, sweet, innocent and simple. The books were my vice and my pacifier. The thing that brought me joy in the times of pain, I could escape to a new world, a fake world where everything was good and appropriately heavy. Books from friends were mostly books I had read twice before and had titles like, “Meghan Meade’s Guide to the  McGowan boys.” Books that made you hopeful that your fairytale ending was not dead. That dream was not gone. I could cheer for a girl getting a date with the boy of her dreams. I stayed in my books, stayed shut like a defective bloom that hasn’t gotten enough sun. It stubbornly refuses to open and looking at it you would think it’s defective but no one knows that it hasn’t gotten enough sun, it’s not the flowers fault. Everything wasn’t all my fault.
My room was still a mess. I had just spent half the day on 3 things. I started getting angry at myself, thinking, “why can’t I just be focused? I can think of multiple times that I could have been actually cleaning instead of letting my mind go on a tangent about the old days.” Then I realized that I only got to three things. And that is okay. Baby Steps. You have to take your life apart to put it back together, just like my room.