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I visit a house quite frequently and it fascinates me in a sad way. Something isn’t right in this house, I feel it as soon as I enter. At first glance you notice it’s messy and cluttered and dirty in spots. But there’s something more. It doesn’t feel like the owner is lazy it feels different. There’s a sadness, a feeling of just a stuckness, there seems to be no light-I don’t mean they need more lamps but it feels sad. You can’t help but wonder, what happened here, do they not care? I’ve been trying to really understand the owner to find out what happened, I can’t imagine it was always like this. Turns out it wasn’t.

The owner is stuck and confused as to what to do. She’s a single mom, she’s been through quite a bit but doesn’t use that as an excuse, if anything she is totally blaming herself. She seems reflective and is certainly trying to find out why too. It’s not a lack of caring more like a state of being frozen of not knowing what to do, perhaps even some hopelessness. The house, I think is reflecting her feelings. She loves her house, you can tell when you talk to her but she is overwhelmed and not sure where to begin or even how. Stuck inside and out.

When she talks about her childhood she talks about growing up with many changes. She talks about her mom and her cleaning habits. How on weekends her mother would suddenly become a scary yelling maniac, who had her kids hiding when she decided the house was a disaster, and, it seemed to the kids they were the cause. Then it became a manic session of cleaning and cowering, trying to stay out of her way and just do what you were told. How the child vowed she wouldn’t do that to her kids and she didn’t but some how she went totally the other way, she expected nothing of kids and left herself the sole person responsible for maintaining it all. The keeper of everything the protector of all. At first it was perfection, everything had to be perfect. That failed, and with failure comes reflection and blaming and the self abuse. Failure, the billboard went up in her brain. As the years went by the billboard grew larger, became well lit and often times had spotlights, and a large brass band proclaiming the hugeness of the failure. Tragedy struck her life several times further creating the environment outside that reflected her psyche inside. Now she is overwhelmed. She is lost searching for a life line with nothing in sight. Is it depression, could be but it seems like something more, a loss of life-no not death but perhaps a loss of joy of life. How does she get it back, why did it leave? She seems to find no pleasure in life, I’d like to help but I have no ideas.

When asked she will tell you her favorite rooms in the house, the cleaner, emptier rooms. The ones with no spaces of clutter but even spending time in these rooms make her start looking closer and finding the flaws. The windows need cleaning, the floor needs new carpet, the corners are dusty. I feel sad for her but can’t seem to help. It’s not the clutter it is not the dirt, it’s the stuff inside her. She is sad and unhappy and it is reflecting outside of her.

Wish I knew what to do.