The Wilful Sunflower

Mark Morris once called me brave. I'm not, really.

The thing with blogging – or any sort of communication – is that I can choose how much information I want to give out about myself. I can present you with a skewed view and hide all (OK, maybe that's a tad optimistic. How about most?) of my imperfections, especially the more annoying ones.

As I said in an email this morning to the man behind Letters to God, I would never dare to publish my own letters to God on the Internet. When I write letters to God, I am just me – sometimes petulant, often selfish, occasionally prideful, and usually confused!

Weaknesses, fears and imperfections have always been, to me, shameful things that I must not let other people see.

My packing has been progressing very slowly because there seems to be a layer of dust everywhere, on everything. Everything needs to be cleaned, wiped or washed before it can be kept away.

See, that is one of my shameful secrets. I take pride in my appearance but behind closed doors I am a mess. I wait till my laundry pile is sky-high before I bundle everything up and send it to the laundrette. Then I'm left with clothes that need to be hand-washed and I just let them sit there until I'm seized with an I-can't-stand-it-anymore-this-has-been-left-too-long washing frenzy.

I start things and never finish them. There is a cross-stitch piece I started back in 1998, still uncompleted. In my boxes are zillions of notebooks that I bought for a specific purpose but remain blank after about 10 or so pages of entries.

Part of the messiness stems from procrastination and laziness – I take things out, and then instead of putting them back where I got them from, I chuck them onto the table or leave them on the floor by the bed.

The other part of the messiness comes from having too much STUFF. Dad says he went to university with one box and one suitcase, and after five years of medical school he came back with one box and one suitcase. "I don't know what you need so much stuff for," he says.

I have oodles of stuff. Well, one-third of it is books, another one-third is clothes and shoes, and the rest is "miscellaneous". I think.

Very few people know that my former landlady asked me to leave because my room was too messy. Granted, I was careful not to mess up the rest of the house. But I considered my room my space, to do with it what I would – within reason, of course.

She said she felt very sad when she saw my room (she'd been in to bring out the Christmas decorations from the built-in cupboards) and she felt bad for giving me bad news so close to Christmas, asking me to move out. What could I say? I knew she was right. My room was messy. And it was her house, after all. Outwardly I was rueful, agreeing that I had a problem with neatness. Inside... I felt crushed by the disapproval.

Someone sent me an email this morning, saying that my post God is not a neurotic parent had been an encouragement. That passage from Seamands’ book has stuck in my mind for years because the idea of having someone to stand by me and help me work through stuff is rather novel. Most of the time it has been, "You need to change. Do it NOW!"

My former landlady's reaction was one in a long line of similar ones from other people. It makes me frightened to let myself be vulnerable anymore.

A friend who reads my blog regularly said to me last week, "You have a lot of hang-ups." Well, yes. I don't deny that. But I’m also trying to work through them.

If you knew how defeated and despairing I sometimes feel when I look around the disaster area that is my room, you would know that you don't have to say a word. I do a good enough job beating up on myself – when I'm not trying to ignore the problem, that is. (I did say that I have ostrich-like tendencies, didn't I?!)