the Mania

Well, I can’t deny it…I often get the mania.  Don’t you get the mania too?   Wait, hold on a minute, you don’t know what the mania is?!?  How could you not know what the mania is?  Well, probably because it is my own made up phrase.

Basically, the mania is when I get crazed to clean / organize our apartment.  Which, granted, I am a pretty clean and organized person…but sometimes I get the urge to organize, re-organize, check things off of my house to-do list, clean-out and purge old unneeded things.  And that my friends is the mania.

For some odd reason, I find that the mania often strikes me after being out of town for awhile.  So post 7 weeks in Europe, you better believe that I had the mania…bad.  On the airplane home I was already plotting out exactly what I thought that I wanted to accomplish when we got home (which was mostly just unpacking and doing some Summer planting).

Cleaning and organizing definitely sparks joy for me, and honestly, it has since I was little.  I was the little girl who liked to vacuum and see the vacuum lines in the carpet of her bedroom.  But funny enough, I also often destroyed my room before cleaning it.  My Mom used to say that it looked “like a bomb went off” in my bedroom, or “that a tornado tore through it.”  But come on, who doesn’t love a good mess to clean up?

And truthfully, I am still the same a little bit.  (Sometimes a lot.)  When I want to organize a closet, I feel the urge to literally pull everything out and go through it all so that I can start with a clean slate.  But once it is all said and done…sigh…it feels like a breath of fresh air to have everything in its place.

So now it is probably starting to make sense to you why I was so quiet the first few days after we got home from our trip…I had the mania.