I’d like to share an excerpt from a manuscript I’m currently working on. It’s written by a soulful young man whose journey through addiction has had me thinking about my own life, my own habits and vices. For an all or nothing girl like me, the notion of one small, seemingly inconsequential change altering the course of one’s life, well, it’s got me looking around for that lynch pin that, when pulled, will set my own act straight. See what you think.
This room in many ways mirrored the chaos that was my life. A life filled with excess, long evening and early morning hours, and little regard for the conventions of the world around me. This was not the room of a healthy man in his early thirties; this was something different.
For the past few years I had woken up and had trouble coming to terms with how my life had taken me down an unrecognizable path. This isn’t how I had started out. What began as a way to have fun and connect with my friends and the world around me had morphed into something totally different. So many aspects of my life had taken a backseat to partying, had become unimportant. After a while, all that was left was the party, and the destruction it often left in its wake. I don’t think I fully comprehended the effect looking at this disarray every day had on my psyche. Often when you feel unhinged and in a state of utter turmoil, life around you begins to reflect just that. There are so many issues that need to be addressed in order to bring some sort of regiment and order to life, that the task of cleaning your room becomes inconsequential. You tell yourself that it is the least of your worries, and brush it to the side. This, and many other things, become casualties in the battle for control of your life.
When I was young my mother had a best friend whom we spent a lot of time with. She had a very cool job in the world of Rock and Roll, which made her lifestyle very different from our own. Crazy parties, excessive eating and drinking, carousing with celebrities till all hours of the night, was this woman’s status quo. My brother and I loved her. She was so much fun and so full of life. Everything about her life was mesmerizing. Now this friend complimented my mother very well. Although their lives had taken very different directions, she ignited a beacon of the fun and adventure that was always just below the surface in my mother. When I would comment on how exciting this woman’s life sounded, my mother would invariably have some grounding comment about the forces at play that made the woman’s lifestyle choice work. As cool and unique as this woman was, every morning, no matter what, she woke up and made her bed. Now, I was young the very first time my mother told me this and had a hard time believing that such a small detail had impacted this woman’s life. But all throughout my childhood and throughout my life this simple example was something that she never grew tired of sharing with me.
Its funny how a sentiment or lesson, no matter how small in scope, can be drilled into you with enough repetition and conviction, can actually find a space in your subconscious. This little lesson, along with most other things that my mother said to me, were universally disregarded for most of my life, written off as positive fodder for someone who looked at life through rose colored glasses. But during a time in my life where I was left with few if any options or positive thoughts, it was this that managed to find its way into my thinking.
When problems become so big that a solution seems unattainable, I found that negativity and despair take over. I had been without a real job for an extended period of time. The jobs that I was qualified for involved long hours and encouraged destructive behavior. Most healthy relationship had fallen by the wayside, and I was spending more and more time using drugs in solitude. I made a decision to try and clean up. I was going to attempt to get free of my debilitating addiction, and after that I had no idea what I was going to do.
So I detoxed and slowly got myself to a place where I was thinking with a clear head.
The problem with having a clear head after many years of drug use, is that the reality of your life and the decisions you’ve made become very clear all at once. This clarity, in my case, added to my defeatist attitude towards the challenges I was now facing. Who was going to hire an ex-drug addict who only had experience working in bars and nightclubs? How was I going to make amends to the people in my life, who at that point had endured a lot of emotional abuse from me? Where could I even hope to begin putting the pieces of my life back together again?
It was during this period of time that I looked at my room with a newfound feeling of disgust and disappointment. Yes it was true that for the moment I wasn’t on drugs anymore, but that was it, the rest of my life still mirrored what it had looked like while I was still in active addiction. It was then that my mothers words rang out in my head, “ You know, N., she wakes up every morning and makes her bed.” I thought, no matter how insignificant this little act was in anyone’s life, that I would give it a try. I knew at this point that I had nothing to lose by trying something different, and that no matter what the result, at least my bed would be made.
So every morning I woke up and made my bed. This is not to say that I cleaned my room as well; I just made my bed.
And in the beginning, the small act had no real effect on me. After a week or two, however, the made bed began to look like a little beacon of hope in a sea of dereliction. More and more it became clear how chaotic my room was, especially with this perfectly made bed right in the middle of it. My messy room might have been something I could ignore, but it seemed to bother me more in contrast to my made bed. So eventually I cleared the things off my bedside table. Then I spent five minutes picking up the dirty clothes off the floor. Within a few weeks my room mirrored my bed, its cleanliness and hint of organization. I realized that something that I had avoided doing for so many years was actually something that could be accomplished in fifteen or twenty minutes, no matter how dirty or unkempt it was. I also saw that if my room was relatively clean to begin with then keeping it that way took much less time.
There is something about my clean room and the feeling of control it gave me that I found unbelievable. This was my room. If I could control nothing else in my life, I could control my room. I had a sense of satisfaction every time I came home and walked through the door to see the immaculate room. This room that had once been a place to hide and indulge in drugs, was now a sanctuary; a representative of the person I was attempting to be. This exercise in self-discipline was a major turning point. With it, I took back control of my life. If I wanted the big things to change, I would have to commit to the smallest stuff first. , As long as I was committed to these small tweaks, I could have huge lasting effects.
The more little things I accomplished, the more confidence it gave me to attempt more. After about a month with a clean and well-kept room, I noticed there was only one thing in it that wasn’t particularly clean or well kept: me. My wrinkled shirts and week old stubble no longer fit seamlessly into my environment. I looked in the mirror and then at my room and started to feel a little out of place. So I began a daily bathing and grooming ritual, which was very foreign to me. For years, I thought that just putting on some dirty jeans and a blazer over an old tee shirt, along with some deodorant, was a substitute for actual bathing. I started to look better, more like someone who had some sort of control over his life.
I know it’s hard to believe that something as small as making my bed became the catalyst for the transformation in my life, but it wasn’t the bed making, it was the promise to do it and following through on that promise.
