noises off

One thing that this moving/renovating/exterminating process has taught me is that I don't deal well with disarray. With every single move I have ever made in the past, all of the boxes have been unpacked and everything put away within 48 hours of returning the moving truck. That is just how I operate. Call me anal, call me a control/clean freak, slap an OCD sticker on my forehead...label me as you will.

It's this simple: when my house is out of order, my mind is out of order.

And I can tell it has been really bad this past week, because there have been so many times that I have been driving along in my car when, all of a sudden, I realize that the radio is turned down, and I have been driving in silence the whole time. But the noise in my head was so loud--the thoughts racing so quickly and the anxieties swirling so furiously--that I didn't even realize it was completely quiet around me.

There are a lot of things I can deal with--a lot of stressors that don't bother me much--but I am discovering that home-stress affects me deeply. I NEED for my house to be a haven. A clean, orderly, comfortable, anxiety-free haven. I want home to be a place where I can drop my worries outside the door and relax--not pick up a whole new bundle of worries. And when my home doesn't feel like that haven, I am thrown out of whack.

So if I seem off to you-- if I appear to be down or pensive or discombobulated or just plain crazy--you know why.

And if I'm quiet, I don't mean to be--I'm just trying to make sense of all the noises in my head.