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Had a setback this morning when one stack of five 20 gallon Rubbermaid containers toppled into another at about 6AM and scared the bejesus out of me. O_O I had to spend a good two hours after that rearranging them in a way where they won't fall over (two stacks of three, and one of four seemed to do the trick). I was actually able to open my closet for the first time in three years today, so my room is about 85% clean (or it will be once I'm done cleaning the baseboards, dusting, and vacuuming so I can stop moving piles of stuff from one area to another and all the stuff I've decided to keep is squared away where it needs to go). I'm hoping to be finished with the majority of cleaning tomorrow, leaving only the closet and the boxes of my stuff that's taking up the den to be gone through until later because Mom's OCD is killing her with the mess I've made in trying to make things cleaner for her. She was very upset at the boxes and bags of stuff we had to sit out for the garbage collectors. "What will the neighbours think?! I can't stand it! They will think it's filthy inside our house!" she says. Well, she's the one who DEMANDED this de-cluttering, so she can deal with the mess it created. Anyone will tell you that my house is immaculately clean besides my room, which has brought much shame to my mother. Honestly, my room has always been too small for all my stuff, and it just got worse as I went to college and started to amass actual furniture and a large amount of artwork and art supplies. She acts as though it was only supposed to take a single day to clean, but I told her that if I was going to do this Spring Clean then I was going to do it correctly and go through every single bag, box, and drawer to get rid of anything unnecessary to really prepare for when I eventually move out.
I actually feel very positive and happy about the progress I've made. I found some stuff that I thought I had lost forever and stuff I forgot that I had and stuff I wish I could forget. I actually discovered a disciplinary report from when I was kindergarten about how I locked myself in the bathroom on Halloween because a boy knocked me down, bit me on my shoulder until I was bleeding, and then chased me in there. I refused to come out until my mom came to get me, and she was so pissed off because she had paid a huge amount of money for the mermaid costume I was wearing and, since Mom wouldn't let me go trick'r'treating, that class party was the only chance I was going to have to wear it.
I also found the book that the school gave my mom when I was in second grade. It was called Raising Your Strong-Willed Child, and it talks about how girls with independent streaks need to be taught conformity, to have low expectations, and that any signs of uniqueness in art, sports, music, or academia need to be quashed as early on as possible because it will make them unsuitable for marriage because they will be unable to be subservient to their husbands if they have self-esteem. My mom told them where they could shove the damn book, but she kept it to show me when I was old enough to understand why the teachers at my elementary school were so horrid to me and treated me so harshly. What had originally prompted them to give her the book was because I refused to play a style of freeze tag that requires children to stand with their legs as wide as possible when they are tagged and to unfreeze them another kid has to crawl between their legs. The boys, of course, would make disgusting comments and try to grope the girls' bits while crawling through, and I was rather uncomfortable with this so I just refused to participate. The teachers didn't know how to handle that and couldn't understand why I was so uncomfortable; they just thought I was being insubordinate, which would later become a reoccurring theme in my academic career and their attitudes and inability to show any empathy towards their students has made me have a severe distrust of authority.
I will be very glad when I'm away from this wretched town because there have to be semi-normal places in this world that aren't as backwards as the day is long. >_
I actually feel very positive and happy about the progress I've made. I found some stuff that I thought I had lost forever and stuff I forgot that I had and stuff I wish I could forget. I actually discovered a disciplinary report from when I was kindergarten about how I locked myself in the bathroom on Halloween because a boy knocked me down, bit me on my shoulder until I was bleeding, and then chased me in there. I refused to come out until my mom came to get me, and she was so pissed off because she had paid a huge amount of money for the mermaid costume I was wearing and, since Mom wouldn't let me go trick'r'treating, that class party was the only chance I was going to have to wear it.
I also found the book that the school gave my mom when I was in second grade. It was called Raising Your Strong-Willed Child, and it talks about how girls with independent streaks need to be taught conformity, to have low expectations, and that any signs of uniqueness in art, sports, music, or academia need to be quashed as early on as possible because it will make them unsuitable for marriage because they will be unable to be subservient to their husbands if they have self-esteem. My mom told them where they could shove the damn book, but she kept it to show me when I was old enough to understand why the teachers at my elementary school were so horrid to me and treated me so harshly. What had originally prompted them to give her the book was because I refused to play a style of freeze tag that requires children to stand with their legs as wide as possible when they are tagged and to unfreeze them another kid has to crawl between their legs. The boys, of course, would make disgusting comments and try to grope the girls' bits while crawling through, and I was rather uncomfortable with this so I just refused to participate. The teachers didn't know how to handle that and couldn't understand why I was so uncomfortable; they just thought I was being insubordinate, which would later become a reoccurring theme in my academic career and their attitudes and inability to show any empathy towards their students has made me have a severe distrust of authority.
I will be very glad when I'm away from this wretched town because there have to be semi-normal places in this world that aren't as backwards as the day is long. >_
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