Phew. Today has been a cleaning day. This afternoon my dad and I went to my aunt’s house to borrow her lawn mower and weed eater because I recently volunteered to take care of our yard this summer. As my sinuses have been acting up and my eyes have been watering just LOOKING at the weeds outside, I may regret this decision. We’ll see. Anyway, while my dad and I were at my aunt’s house, she told us her freezer had been acting up. It was frozen over in the back. Consequently, everything in the front was melting like the Wicked Witch of the West–chicken thighs, burritos, quarts of vanilla ice cream. It was a damn mess.

My dad and I did the best we could–got the ice off the removable shelves and threw all the food away. My aunt said, “I’ll just start over.” Sometimes that’s what you have to do. As for the freezer itself, we left it to defrost on its own. Short of dragging the entire refrigerator/freezer out of my aunt’s kitchen, all we could do was let it drip on to the tile floor. Thankfully, my aunt has plenty of towels.

When we got home, I dusted my room top to bottom. This hasn’t happened since November 13th of last year. (I know this because I blogged about it.) That’s four months. Don’t judge. During that time I busted my knee; cleaning was the least of my worries. Plus, I like to let the dust build up a bit. Then I can really see progress. After an hour of cleaning tonight, I thought, My god, this room sparkles. In addition to being cleaner, it’s tidier. I used cleaning as an excuse to sort through papers and books I’d let pile up. I have a makeshift bulletin board where I put inspirational cards and pictures, and I took a few of them down. (Sorry, mister, you don’t inspire me anymore!) Then I gathered several books to donate to a local library. Maybe someone else can enjoy them.

In the mood to get shit done, I cleaned my bathroom next. (After dinner because you gotta eat.) Ugh. This was really gross. You don’t realize how much soap scum is in your shower until you wipe–um, scrape–it off. But now my bathroom sparkles too.

Yippee. No more cleaning for another four months.

It’s weird how easy it is to let things get away from you. Dust and soap scum aside, it’s so easy to throw a piece of paper in a pile or set a book on a shelf and think, I’ll get to that later. And whereas the contrast is nice when you finally do get around to cleaning and tidying, it really is better if you can stay on top of things. I’m speaking in theory, of course, but I’ve heard there are some people who do this. Rather than clean an entire room (or house) at once, they’ll do the furniture one day, the windows the next, and so on. A little bit here and there.

I mean, it’s one way of living.

Tomorrow’s post will complete two full years of blogging. I keep saying this, but it doesn’t seem possible. I still so vividly remember blog #1, blog #2. Back then two years seemed impossible. But how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. How do you blog for two years? One day at a time.

The last few days I’ve talked about the internal benefits of this blog, how it’s changed my level of confidence and almost everything else for the better. This afternoon I’ve been thinking of an external benefit–my writing discipline has improved. For example, two years ago a typical post took five to six hours. Several months or maybe a year in, a post took three hours, maybe four. And whereas my posts are shorter than they used to be, now a post takes two hours max, sometimes just one. It varies, of course, but my point’s the same–writing has gotten easier with practice. In the beginning, I had to groan and grunt to get my words and emotions out of me and on to the page. Now I sit down and they just know–the page is where they belong.

Along these lines, last night I started rewatching a favorite childhood cartoon, The Care Bears Movie. Sometimes I like to do this, go back and rewatch something I watched ad nauseam as a kid. I only got about thirty minutes into the cartoon before I passed out, but even by my current touchy-feely standards, it’s kind of cheesy. “We’re your friends,” the bears say to two complete strangers. My thought–Bitch, we just met. “Feelings don’t belong inside,” they say. “Feelings are meant to be shared.” Ugh, how did that message not sink in thirty years ago?

Of course, the bears make it sound simple to open up and share what’s inside you. It’s not. That is, we’re taught as children to suppress. For most of us, shutting down was–at one point–a matter of survival. For example, if you got hit every time you cried, the natural response would be to STOP CRYING. Not that you’d stop getting sad, of course, you’d just stop showing it. Like I did these last four months with the clutter and dust in my room, you’d let your emotions build up.

In my experience, therapy has been, in part, about getting out and cleaning up all the emotions I shoved down and let build up over the years–anger, sadness, confusion, you name it. I think everyone needs to do this at some point–clean their internal house. Not that it’s fun to scrape soap scum off your soul, but why carry around more baggage than you have to? This blog has likewise been a good way for me to get things cleaned up. Used to, I’d let things bother me for days, weeks. Sometimes I still do, of course, but most the time I can get something sorted out on the same day it happens–right here, on this blog. This means the inevitable nonsense from one day doesn’t get carried into the next. This too has gotten easier with practice.