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I just handed off my car to my oldest daughter and I figured I would clean it out first before officially giving her the keys.
Oof.
The car wasn’t horrible. But it was very dusty, with clutter everywhere, old CDs, some mysterious stains. I spent a good 90 minutes scrubbing and vacuuming, and I felt pretty good handing it off to her at that point.
But it is yet another reminder about being messy. I am a recovering slob, in addition to the booze and drugs. Every six weeks or so, I look around and realize there is crap piled up around me.
And I have a fight within myself all the time about being a slob. One part of me says, “Who cares? What’s the big deal with having a messy room and a car that has some trash on it?”
The other part of me hates walking past my messy side of my bedroom, past the desk piled up with papers and other riffraff, and out to my car that has receipts and crap laying all over it. And that part of me really hates when I catch myself saying, “God, I should clean this mess up. Eh, maybe tomorrow.”
You can probably guess which voice wins out most of the time. I will give myself some credit, that I don’t think I am gross any more. There’s no old food with bugs crawling around in it or horrible smells. It’s piled up laundry, old papers that I should file or get rid of—basically, clutter.
But I have found that if my life is messy, my spiritual condition is messy. If my spiritual condition is messy, my whole life gets messy. If my whole life is messy, my sobriety is in jeopardy. Then I’m in huge trouble.
It speaks to two broader points in my life. One is that being messy isn’t great… but the procrastination thing is even worse. Anything I know I should do and can do that I don’t do… that’s a very icky feeling. I actually find it to be worse than the initial problem because you end up feeling bad about the mess and then bad about yourself for letting it slide.
The second one is that messiness is an infectious disease. I never have had a disgusting car and a really clean life. I’ve never had mounds of crap all over my house… but been serene and content. There’s always a connection between my literal messiness and my figurative messiness. If I make my bed and clean out my car, it usually means I am on top of things and I’m not procrastinating. It usually means I am a better husband, better dad, better worker, better neighbor and a person with a clean car. When my room is a dumpster and my car smells like an old gym towel, it usually means I’m showing up late to things, forgetting to respond to emails, saying “I’ll scoop the litterboxes tomorrow” and a bunch of other behaviors that don’t serve me or anybody else well.
So… that noise you hear is my paper shredder firing up in the background. Time to do some cleaning. Goddamn it.
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
HEARD AT MEETINGS
"I would rather go through life sober, believing I am an alcoholic, than go through life drunk, trying to convince myself that I am not."
(Credit: Grapevine, November 2004, by Anonymous)
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