I don’t particularly enjoy cleaning my room, so I don’t. I was originally claiming it’s been three years since I last cleaned, but after further pondering I realized I hadn’t cleaned my closet in three years. My entire room never actually went through a complete cleaning since that woman with the incredibly ripe stench scrubbed it down before we moved in…five and a half years ago. Whoops. If you’re not repulsed enough yet, my legs in the picture above are covered in two months worth of unshaved hair.
Even Jon Hamm’s immaculate face and Christina Hendricks’ glorious bod couldn’t beautify the garbage dump that was my room. At this point, you’re probably wondering what kind of terrible parents would allow their spawn to let her room reach this level of nastiness. My “I’m an artistic genius that needs to express herself” excuse has worked fairly well for me all these years. Besides, they rarely have to spend extensive time periods in there, so what do they care?
But alas, the filth became too much for me to handle. I watched an episode of Hoarders where they found a dead cat under the piles of trash and became concerned that Leelee never went off to a better place but was actually partially decomposed somewhere in my room. I was also missing several items crucial to my survival, like socks and that community service sheet I never turned in. An unpleasant odor may or may not have been developing as well.
For five nights in a row, I cleaned my little heart out. I was determined to have a fresh, clean room by the new year. The process was surprisingly liberating. I stared at that clutter every day knowing it should be taken care of, and it bothered me that I never wanted to. To make it easier, I took the same approach they do on Hoarders – if I didn’t even realize that something was missing, it went in the trash. My desk alone produced three full bags of garbage. It’s a shame that I didn’t think to take a picture of the inside of the drawers, because that area alone took the majority of the time. I’m glad the poor lighting in my room caused these photos be be noisy because it covers the half-inch layer of dust covering every surface.
The stacks of useless junk have been replaced by all those adorable stuffed animals and gnomes I never knew what to do with, the surfaces have been wiped clean, and the floor has been vacuumed. My room looks slightly sterile now, but that’s not something I could fix. I’m assuming my parents never let me paint the walls because they’re preparing me for my future in a padded cell, so I’m okay with it for now. I have several posters and magazine covers that I plan to tape up soon anyway. I wanted to include a more cleaned up picture of myself as well, but I was unfortunately wearing the same outfit I wore in the first picture when I took the after pictures. I wasn’t going to break my ten-day pajama-wearing streak just for you people.
