@RJnomore1
The two women I know well who are obsessive about this sort of thing both gre up in dirty, abusive homes. Mess and disorder triggers their memories. It’s a way of them keeping control (and for both of them it well precedes social media). Actually I also know a man who is the same. And I totally get them.
It’s the idea that cleaning is a hobby that baffles me. It’s not, it’s part of life. There’s a whole world of exciting things out there to learn, see and do and people are obsessed with zoflora. It’s also not really physically healthy, all the chemicals and no chance to maintain your immune system. It’s baffling, performative and I suspect in some cases a way of feeling superior?
It's really difficult to vocalise just how claustrophobic it feels.
Everything feels unpleasant - the surfaces, the clothes, the light, the air - everything. You can't even let your eyes relax because there is stuff shouting at you for attention wherever you let them fall - and if you forget yourself for an instant, you're likely to get hurt, get dirtier or get tangled up in more stuff.
The walls close in, the air is stifling and thick with dust, there's always a particularly unpleasant smell somewhere, you can't see clearly, you know that everything outside your body is a hazard and you can't do anything about it.
Add in abuse and violence with a side of gaslighting about how it's fine really, only common people clean all the time, only boring people clean all the time, how you are entirely responsible for the mess of twenty years when you're only ten, how it's normal to have to wear shoes inside because your feet need protecting from the floor and only common women have people take shoes off in the house - and everything about dirt and clutter adds to the constant feeling that something is going to happen at any given moment.
But if your home is clean and tidy, it smells different. The air feels cool and clean. You can stare off into space and there's nothing getting into your line of sight demanding your attention. You touch a worksurface and it feels clean. You can smell the scent of a tree in blossom outside or honeysuckle in summer, not whatever was festering in the binbags. A buzzing sound is a bumblebees outside the window in the sunshine, not flies coming into the house where they will crawl over the pots and plates after crawling over animal faeces. You can pick anything up out of the cupboard without stuff falling out on your head, disturbing vermin or having to wash it again before use. Your bed is comfortable rather than worsening your symptoms. Sunlight pours in through the open window. You can feel the clean rug under bare feet as you walk safely from bathroom to bedroom without fear of something slicing your foot open.
And because the air is right, the light is right, everything you see, hear, feel, experience is different, there are the scents of flowers and fruit and plants (real or fake) instead of decay, grease, shit and dust, you aren't in that old place.
Damn right I feel superior to the woman who made us live in those conditions.