The Phases of Cleaning My Room

I often find myself stuck at the corner of my room because there is literally no space for me to move around, thanks to the trainwreck my laziness leads to. It is during times like these when I decide to take up the insurmountable task of cleaning my room.

While it usually takes a whole day till I can see my own reflection on the floor, there are several phases involved and if you are a sloth like me, you just might relate. 

It mostly starts with an overwhelming dread about the colossal amount of work that needs to be done. I sit on a pile of dirty laundry that smells like a week old chicken cheese burger with ketchup, hopelessly looking for a place to start. Daunted, I seek help from wikiHow and after an hour of browsing through a plethora of articles on how to clean up a terribly messy room, I feel like I finally got this. 

After another two hours of reading completely unrelated wikiHow articles and learning how to make dresses for puppies even though I do not own a puppy, I remember how I got here in the first place and rush to get started only to slip on a bunch of colour pencils randomly scattered across the floor. Ignoring the terrible pain in my back, I decide to start by putting the pencils back where they should be. 

My productivity reaches a peak in the next few hours and I zoom around the room, tidying up the mess it once was. The piles of unwanted papers and stinking clothes shorten as they make their way to the dustbins and washing machine, the books lying around find themselves dusted and neatly stacked on squeaky clean bookshelves, the fish tank gets cleaned and I pat myself on the back for not having procrastinated my time away. I feel so elated to have cleared at least as much space for me to walk through, I decide to take a snack break which lasts much longer than a typical snack break.

Soon enough, I realise working with an over-full stomach makes the working part more difficult but nonetheless, I go ahead to clean out the messier and scarier parts of the room, also known as my drawers and closets. For the first time ever, I finally understand what my mother means when she says I have more clothes than I need as a gigantic ball of clothing items tumbles right out of the wardrobe when I open its door. I then sort out the clothes into two piles: to be kept and to be given away, clean out the drawers containing the cosmetics I bought two years ago and never got around using. Somewhere in between all this, I wreak havoc for a while because when I placed my hand inside of a drawer, I was sure I felt something move.

In the time span of twenty four hours punctuated with numerous snack breaks, procrastination breaks, finding-an-old-soft-toy-and-going-down-memory-lane breaks and I-can't-do-this-anymore breaks, I finally lie down on my newly made bed and think of my accomplishment. My room has never looked more brand new and my life has never felt so under control.