Are You Messy or Neat?

Is this too personal of a question?

I’m messy!

My place is cluttered, although I have areas decluttered. It seems every time I get one area looking OK, another area deteriorates.

Sigh. Why can’t I be naturally neat??

How about you?

I'm a neat freak but I grew up in choas and mess so I simply can't stand for it now. Plus I have very bad ADD so if I don't put EVERYTHING in it's place and keep things orderly I'll never find anything.

If I were living by myself... I'd be very neat and organized. Since I have a toddler, a teenager and my partner - it is utterly impossible. The more I try to clean and organize, the more impossible it is. Example - I have neat little bins for all my toddlers toys and when I clean them up everything is nice and organized. If my fiancée does it - everything is thrown in the corner behind the couch. Drives me absolutely insane. If you can't clean up right, don't bother at all. It makes more work for me having to fix it then it does for you to just let me do it right the first time. If I let it get to me then we end up fighting about it. I don't want to fight about it so I just don't bother cleaning as much as I should. Some people think I'm being lazy or messy, but its really because I'm seething with rage underneath if I have to re-clean and organize a mess that's supposedly already been cleaned up.

I need to clean my computer desk, it has too many papers on it. There are things I need to organize better...some of my clothes, for example. Chronic back pain keeps me from staying really on top of certain chores, which is extremely frustrating. Overall, though, I like to live in a clean environment. And I don't own much at all, which is fine.

I live surrounded by chaos - I wish I could control it and do occasionally declutter/tidy but things fall apart...

I'm rather neat and organized. I sometimes do fall behind and have some spots that build clutter, for instance a pile of shirts on a bookcase that need to be hung up in the closet or my kitchen table might become a catch all for a couple of days or a pile of papers on my desk that need filing. I could do better at dusting.

I can't stand and am irritated by chaos. I may not have the most spic and span household but everything is neat and tidy. I tidy multiple times per day. I only clean on a weekly basis.

I'm messy and cluttered! However, I like organization and an uncluttered environment. It makes me feel calm.

I walked into work and found my desk messy from Friday.

Typical!!

I'm messy, I can't do "neat" if my life depends upon it

Normally I'm very neat and organized but, when I get depressed I set stuff down in places were it doesn't really belong and leave it for a while or even go a long time without cleaning up a messy room and if it's bad depression then, seeing the mess makes me feel even worse so I just leave that room so, that I don't have to look at it.
Eventually, when the depression passes and I'm disgusted with the mess, I clean it up again.

I’m kind of a mix of messy and cluttered. I don’t like dirt so I try to keep the kitchen and bathroom relatively clean. However I practically live out of my laundry basket. I’m terrible about folding and putting away clothes. I haven’t opened my mail in 6 months. I do my banking and bill paying online so it’s mostly junk anyway. I don’t accept receipts and miscellaneous paper work from stores and doctors offices so I don’t have to deal with much paper work. My email inbox is another story. I have like 600 mails in there. I finally had to create a vip inbox for the people that I actually want mail from, my husband, son, art teacher and credit card fraud alerts. Everything else can just rot. I don’t care!

Very neat. “Clean freak” to be precise. A bit much. Everything has to be “just so”. I once had a visitor who didn’t know us asking if the house is staged as for selling. Lol Nope. staged fir living. Lol

It’s not empty though. I do have ton of stuff, ton ton of clothes (and yes it’s always organized by color etc etc etc)

I'm Messy

I'm a slob.

Being excessively neat is triggering for me. I was very neat as a child as a way to stay out of trouble. At 5 years old I cleaned my room and made my bed every day without fail.

As an adult I am messy, but there's order to my chaos. I try to maintain a level of organization, and there is organization behind the messiness. I also have cleaners that come in once a month to help me clean so it doesn't get out of hand.

I acknowledge I am messy. It's how I am. I'm not changing or going to pretend to try and change for anyone. I keep things clean though by bringing in a housekeeper every so often. If someone wants to judge me for it (and others have) they can go to hell.

Seesaw

I'm pretty neat. No, wait -- that sounds like I'm full of myself. I'm pretty tidy. But I'm not obsessive about it.

I may have a stack of papers or things on a table that I'm not getting around to for some time, but such things are always put to one side. I can't stand having to always dig through things to get at other things. So anything that gets used on a regular basis has an unobstructed spot that it lives in.

Key tones, as for trying to be neat, I can only tell you it's a head thing. In my experience, no amount or quality of "storage solutions" will make a messy person tidy. Buying a larger house doesn't work either. Messy people unconsciously expand their mess to fill all available space. (I postulate that here and now.) Sorry about that.

I will say that I have created strategies for staying organized as a messy person. So I disagree that storage solutions can't work. For example, mail use to clutter everything and receipts. Now I have 2 containers on my counter, one for mail, the other for receipts. And it works for me.

I think messy people can build strategies or solutions for keeping things under control but no, they will never turn into neat freaks.

Hey Shazerac! I think you've been away from PC since a vacation last year. So, forgive me, but I have to ask if in all that time ...

... did you ever successfully contact the mothership?



Us sci-fi fans wanna know.
And was it messy up there?

Cep, you called it. That would be me!!

Big messy house!!!

LOL...

Oh my gosh, you are always cracking me up!!

Tortie, thank you for this!!

Hi seesaw,
(I'm slow posting tonight, my internet connection is being rubbish.)
Ah, I should have been more clear. What you said makes perfect sense. I was somewhat teasing key tones, and when I put "storage solutions" in quotes I was referring to those advertised miracle/superior organizers that you see on TV or in flashy catalogs. Of course, containers will work. But if they were truly concerned and motivated, they could have just used any boxes or containers they had lying around rather than laying blame on the lack of an expensive and overwrought "system" of some kind.

I guess I've just known way too many people who expect the organizers to somehow do the organizing and cleaning for them without any physical action or effort on their part. A curious expectation, to say the least.

And as long as I don't have to live with them, I don't care if people are messy. Not for me to tell people how to live. Besides, if I visit I'll just put these mess-blocking shades on.

Hahah, I get it. I wonder sometimes if it is possible to change or not. I was always so fastidiously neat, and then I changed. I think I'm a weird case because of trauma. I do think that people can adjust their habits. But just like anything that comes naturally or doesn't, you have to work at it. Will I ever be naturally neat? No. Absolutely not. But I can maintain some level of organization as part of healthy habits I have developed. I have accepted that about myself.

I think the worst part of the messy or neat debate (not here but in society) is that each side seems to judge the other. It's neither here nor there, it's just the way someone's brain functions.

<snicker>

I say when you start thinking about buying bins and organizers and such, it’s time to get rid of whatever it is. You know, as long as it isn’t *my* stuff!!