Growth and Cleaning Your Room

Alyssa Pendon

Aug 1

One thing about my family is that we tend to forget things sometimes. We have a lot of ideas we want to pursue, but sometimes they just pass by. My parents bought me a desk for my room about 2 years ago, and… we just built it last week. I completely forgot about it! Along with the rest of my family. But since we decided to build the desk, I had to clean out my room. I consider my room to be ‘clean’, but in reality, it isn't because I have never deep-cleaned it since I got my room. Which was in 2011.

I think I exaggerated that because I probably did clean it after that, but the whole point is that my room is filled with all the stuff I’ve amassed throughout the years. Spoiler alert, it’s way too much for a sixteen-year-old girl to have. I never realized that I have so much stuff! From toys to stationery to stuffed animals, there was so much.

Before this, I completely underestimated the amount of stuff I had. I dedicated this past week to be my ‘lock in’ week because I was too busy this summer to actually do anything, and I procrastinated the whole summer. Well, the better answer to this is that I was living in the moment. But I realized I had to actually do some things and ‘lock in’ before my junior year. I just didn’t realize that there were so many things that I owned, and it was going to take a lot longer than five days to effectively clean my space.

It also doesn't help that I’m in the middle of HalfTheStory’s Digital Civics Academy, an online summer program for youth to be equipped with the resources to influence policy in the digital world. Although it has been very fun and insightful, I’ve had to schedule all my ‘cleaning times’ around the program, which is online from 11am-3pm Central time every day.

I also had a dentist appointment, literally today, which took up a lot of my time since my dentist is my aunt and she lives 45 minutes away. Although it was perfectly fine, I had to miss a lot of my summer program, and I have two meetings later, making it so I don’t have a lot of time to clean my room.

But as I battle the way my perfect schedule is ‘ruined’ by the distractions I label in my head, I feel bittersweet as I sort through all my things. Although the stuff in my room aren’t things I use every day, I get to relive some of my past, and I feel so old. I know I’m not old at all, but it always feels like I’m old. Maybe it’s because most of my cousins are younger than me, or because I’m becoming one of the ‘oldest’ at school now . I’m not sure, but looking at my past journals and my old favorite items made me feel so sad. I’m no longer the person I was before, and I’ll never get her back, but at the same time it’s been such a joy to see myself grow and change. Seeing the items that made me happy was heartwarming, and the fact that I can see the growth between the views and things I enjoyed now is such a beautiful thing.

So even though I can get annoyed when I underestimate how long it takes to complete something and that a lot of things just don’t go the way I planned, I have to remember that it’s not always going to work the way I want to, and that sometimes the process can show your own growth.

To end, enjoy some pictures of my really messy room. Don’t hate on me; a lot of [1] it still needs to be cleaned.