As I pushed aside the shower curtain and stepped under the running shower head, I suddenly became hyper-aware of how slimy the floor felt under my feet. A shiver of disgust ran through my body and I tried my hardest to shut the slippery sensation out. I wasn’t wearing my glasses of course, so everything was a blur to me. However, I was still able to see the faint marks of mildew around the edges of the shower, the discoloration along the hem of the curtain and the accumulation of muck in the various nooks and crannies in the walls. I was appalled at what a filthy state the bathroom had fallen into.
The lack of cleanliness didn’t just end there — the kitchen had various pots and pans piled high in the sink, the trash was overflowing and there were crumbs all over the counter-tops that just seemed to have become permanent fixtures. In short, the apartment resembled a pigsty and all of its inhabitants — myself included — seemed to be unbothered by it.
It struck me how complacent I had become as a college student, how unaffected I was by the conditions of my living place. How did this happen? Why was I so unconcerned? I may be a messy person, no more or less than the average, but never had I indulged in the realm of dirtiness.
It became pretty obvious right away that most of the reason for this complacency was the fact that my mother wasn’t around. There was no one to nag me constantly about cleaning my room and leaving behind any area I had occupied the way I found it. While it could be annoying, her badgering ultimately got the job done. It struck me how much I missed it now, along with the realization that it was quite terrible how I was so used to someone running after me to ensure I did what I was told, or else do it for me. College is about learning how to be an adult, but all I was learning was how far away from adulthood I was.
There are many other factors of course, that lead to this complacency in cleanliness. One of them is the ever-present problem of procrastination. There is always something more pressing on our minds than doing the dishes or vacuuming the carpet. We would rather sleep on a bed piled high with clothes than take the time to dismantle the mountain of clothing and fold it. Moreover, we think that it’s just silly to clean when you know it will go back to being a mess in a matter of 24 hours. We convince ourselves that there is no point in doing it because we don’t see the long term effect of such small, daily chores.
We also don’t want to become the roommate who is a stickler for neatness — who wants things to be spic and span constantly — for fear of being pegged as uptight or singled out as irritating to others. Furthermore, it becomes an issue of defiance. We think, “If I take the initiative and clean, everyone else will just start depending on me. Why should I take time out and mop if no one else will? It is their problem too, and it’s not just my job to take care of this.”
In the end, when things simply become too nasty, we give in and carry out a little bit of surface cleaning — everything is swept under the rug, sometimes literally, embracing the “out of sight, out of mind” technique. The floor may be swept to at least remove whatever is visible and create the illusion that it is clean, but getting to the real dirt will require a good scrub.
It’s odd how something as simple as cleaning can teach you a lot about a psychological mindset. Although it is not a situation that would require serious damage control, it’s strange to see how soundly you can convince yourself that leaving things in their grimy states is not a big deal and that a little dirt never hurt anyone. Our brains perform the magic act of distancing us from the lack hygiene of our surroundings by slowly making us numb to it.
Ironically, when I leave my apartment on Grounds and go back home for break, I find even the smallest bit of grime repulsive and can’t stand it at all. However, it’s our responsibility to keep our surroundings clean, even when there is no one there to hold us accountable.
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