Where is Rowena?

Following his emigration and what I suspect is a messy and potentially costly divorce after he ran off with the estate agent, my landlord decided to sell the beautiful Montpelier flat that I've spent the last year and a half living in. This has forced me to move. There are many good things about moving. I now live in the unexpectedly lovely Southville, which has given me a new area of the city to explore and a much more pleasant walk to work, both of which are doing wonders for revitalising my Instagram account. I have three new housemates to get to know. My rent has decreased by over £30 per month. I have a garden now. My new room has an amazing view. But there is a massive downside: the fact that, in order to get my deposit back, I had to empty and clean my room.

Anybody who has been lucky enough to spend a great deal of time with me in person will know that I am exceptionally messy. A former housemate was once asked as part of an embarrassingly tame game of Truth or Dare what the untidiest thing he'd ever done was. His reply was, "Live with Rowena." While I dispute the truth of this allegation (he once told me about a bathmat in one of his previous shared houses that actually grew mushrooms), I can understand its origins. I spend my life surrounded by piles of stuff that I have somehow amassed, in a bedroom where only five or six things have a set place, and even then they are rarely in it. My clothes, instead of being in the wardrobe or the laundry basket where they ought to be, litter the floor and the bed, leaving my room looking like the aftermath of a devastating fabric hurricane. The floor is inevitably covered in pennies, hair grips, scraps of paper, and, for some reason, my own hair.

I wish I could say these habits are confined to my bedroom. They are not; I take them on tour with me. If I carry the same bag for more than a week it will invariably end up filled with random bits and pieces that I only needed to bring with me once but never bothered putting back, but also things that I should really just throw away. Of the contents of my bag, the number of receipts and bits of packaging in there is roughly double that of the items which don't belong in a bin. Essentially, as well as turning my personal space into a disgusting clutter nest, I carry a bag of rubbish around with me. 

Longtime readers may remember my post detailing what happened to me when I left my year abroad packing to the last minute (and if you haven't read it then you should definitely click here and do so immediately). I imagine they are quite surprised that I haven't learnt from my mistakes and started organising myself a little better by now. I certainly would like to. I see the benefits in being neat and tidy, and every so often (usually prompted by some external and unavoidable force, like a house move or a nagging mother) I decide that I really am going to change my ways. I buy overpriced diaries with beautiful covers at the beginning of the year, just like everyone else, and by February I have stopped writing in them. I gaze wistfully into my tidy housemates' pristine bedrooms and comment on how lovely everything looks compared to the Urban Outfitters explosion that has occurred behind my own door. I tell myself every time I move that this time I will be neat and organised. This will be the room that I keep nice. I buy the scented candles. I arrange everything on the shelves. I put all my makeup back in its brand new case and hang my clothes on their brand new hangers. "We can do this," says the part of me that envies the tidy people. "For the first time ever, we will have a beautiful bedroom."

But, unfortunately, this part of me is not strong. It is the same part of me that wants to be thinner and good at saving up. It has the best intentions in the world, but its growth has been stunted. It is visibly weak and vulnerable – the equivalent of a pock-marked twelve-year-old with a terrible haircut and not enough self-awareness to stop correcting their classmates' diction – and as such it is regularly beaten up by a larger, stronger, more aggressive part of my brain which just wants to lie around and order a Domino's.

This is the dominant part of me, the part responsible for a substantial chunk of my behaviour. It embraces the chaos. It thrives in clutter. It changes plans at the last minute and comes home too late for dinner because it ended up having much more fun than it expected to. At university it wrote its best essays lying on a bed and never once sat at a desk. At work it keeps a cactus and a knitted ferret next to the computer because they were gifts from lovely people and it wants to remember them when things get stressful. At home it saves cardboard boxes and leaves them in piles in a corner of the bedroom because it really wants to recycle them, even if it does forget occasionally. It does not want to dedicate an entire day to tidying up because there are so many books to be read, conversations to be had, places to be visited, meals to be eaten, and naps to be taken. It does not fear new and unexpected possibilities. It does not fear lack of order. It does not fear dysentery. 

I know my own mind too well to bother attempting to convince myself that I can become one of the tidy people, one of the organised people, one of the people who wears clothes that need to be ironed and cleans their skirting boards when there isn't a £585 deposit at stake. I also clearly see that there are some benefits to being the way that I am, like being able to handle changed plans as a consequence of never making any plans. Having said all this, it's a new year, and if this blog has any semblance of a central theme (aside from me being needlessly rude about things that irritate me more than they should) it is my constant quest for self-improvement. I used to take a strange, almost aggressive pride in being a messy person, but I'm nearly twenty-four now and I've lost too many earrings and stepped on too many plugs to be myopic enough to no longer see the benefits of having a tidy bedroom, or at the very least a clear floor. 

So what do I want to be? I suspect that, like with so much else, it's a case of that mysterious and elusive middle ground, where the people who can actually do things in moderation live. The people who keep a lovely clean house but don't stress when someone tracks mud through it. The people who never get too drunk but still manage to be fun. The people who maintain a healthy weight but never bore you with details of their exercise regime and are happy to share an enormous portion of dirty fries with you. I've never actually met one, but I've been assured they exist. And even if they don't, I see no intrinsic harm in aspiring to be one. An aspiration probably not being achievable doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to achieve it, or as close to it as we can get. 

We're at the start of a new year, and, in spite of myself and my own experiences, I have hope. I'm in a new house, in a new area, and with a new (and improved) room. I say it every time I move, but maybe this actually will be the one that I keep nice. This is, after all, the year of President Donald Trump, and if a melted waxwork covered in cobwebs can achieve the most prestigious political position in the world then I think I can manage putting a few clothes in a laundry bag.