Memories of Mess

Perhaps the most interesting thing about having become openly associated with the brighter side of mess and disorganization is that I’ve become privy to many people’s mess- and neatness-related confessions. I’ve been particularly struck by how many people apparently carry around with them powerful memories of childhood encounters with their own or a family member’s unusually messy or neat behavior–memories that seem to have had a big effect on them. Many of the stories relate to confrontations with parents, typically over an obsessively neat parent’s dramatic overreaction to a mess–one person told me how her mother severely wrecked the child’s room, including damaging many of her possessions, so the child would find it “messy enough” to straighten up. But in some cases it’s the opposite: a parent tries to make a child feel out of place for being unusually neat, as was the case with the person who told me she used to have to sneak out of bed in the middle of the night to straighten up her room without her parents giving her grief about it. I think most of us as children tend to feel, at least at first, that whatever our houses look like is a “normal” level of mess, but at some point we start to have a sense that in some ways we and/or our parents are out of whack when it comes to neatness and organization. One person told me it took her a while to realize there was something a bit unusual about the fact that her grandmother used to climb on top of their house once a week to sweep it. As adults, of course, we’re pretty finely tuned to the way our ideas about mess clash with others’–the person who told me that her husband insists on vacuuming the cat every day was crystal clear from day one on her position that her husband was way over the line. But it may well be those childhood mess-related disasters and humiliations and epiphanies that really play a role in shaping the way we see the world. I think about this when I’m tempted to give any of my kids serious grief about their occasionally extreme messiness (though actually one of my three kids is fairly neat). I draw the line at missing homework, missed appointments, blocked access to parts of a room, mess that spills into common areas, and mess involving anything that rots, leaks or is pointy. Otherwise, given that they’ve all so far done well in school and their chosen goals, I’d just as soon skip the fights–otherwise, who knows what strange memories I might end up sticking them with?

So you’re messy. How’s that working out?

Got a messy desk? Cluttered garage? Find yourself jumping around between tasks instead of focusing in on one task and crunching through it? Are you a procrastinator? Do you lack a detailed plan for the next week, month, decade of your life? Well, according to most of the experts, you need help. According to me and Eric Abrahamson, you may be a mess-master–someone who intuitively takes advantage of randomness and avoids potentially time-wasting and counterproductive forms of order. What’s your take? Details welcome.