If you’ve ever done a real detox off drugs and alcohol to get clean, the whole notion of cleaning your flat as a way to some sort of psychological Nirvana seems suspect. Yet this is exactly what the new cleaning gurus, like Marie Kondo, Mrs Hinch (2.4m Instagram fans and counting) and Lynsey “Queen of Clean” Crombie, would have us believe.
They say that chucking everything out and sterilising what is left is a way to put order back into our messy lives. An abundance of videos featuring confessional cleaning tutorials show bright-eyed and often beautiful young women extolling the virtues of cleaning in the reverent terms usually reserved for religious conversions, spiritual awakenings or the moment you receive your yoga name in India. Eat, Pray, Clean. They have seen the light – and it smells like Ecover.
It doesn’t really wash with me. Because, if you have done proper detox off drugs, this all seems like light-weight charlatanism. In this sense, to me, cleanliness is next to oddliness, a seemingly practical way not only to get rid of actual stuff you don’t need (and I have no problem with that), but also, less convincingly, some sort of lifting of a deep spiritual malaise. For they tell us memorabilia, if it does not bring you great joy, is bad.
I beg to differ. I love memorabilia, particularly that belonging to others. Every object tells a story and, to my mind, an important one. I love other people’s stories. They shed light on my own and this, to me, is healing. That’s why I have always preferred cleaning other people’s messes instead of my own. It’s also, in part, why I was a house and flat cleaner for a few years after getting out of rehab.
Learning to navigate life drug-free was like learning a new language. Stuff, things, physical mess, was easier. I’m not saying I took the job for metaphorical justice, ie cleaning while clean. I took it because it was all I felt I was capable of doing. Its meaning in my recovery occurred to me later. Then I wrote a book about it.
In my story, yes, there is a bit of My Drugs Hell, a tale so familiar it has its own category in bookshops: addiction lit. But to me, a key aspect of recovery was easing very gently back into real life by playing mummies and daddies at other peoples’ houses. I was rubbish at being a real wife, but I could pretend to be a wife to all the people who were out at work as I changed their sheets, vacuumed Venetian blinds with a special Venetian blind Hoover attachment and took all the educational toys cluttering the stairs back to the kids’ rooms.
It was replaying scenes from my own old life. The main difference was, as David Byrne once warbled: “This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife…” (or husband). It was the houses that looked most like the one I left that hurt the worst. No one was ever going to burst through the door and bellow, “Honey, I’m home!” But that is not to say that cleaning other people’s houses did not do me significant psychological good as well as keeping me off the dole. There was something about being reliable, dependable, if not quite a treasure (for I was not that great a cleaner) that sat well with my newly drug-free self.
Cleaning as something that is really good for you is not a new discovery. In 2008 a study published in the Journal of Sports Medicine reported that 20 minutes of vigorous cleaning was enough to reduce anxiety and depression up to 20% in people suffering from these common disorders. How they quantify what constitutes 20% less miserable is questionable and frankly, brisk walking, preferably out of your possibly messy flat, results in the same reduction of angst. Another study reported higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol in people who have cluttered homes. But is it a causal relationship or are people who are stressed-out at, say, work or life just too busy to clean their flats? The science is patchy, but there is no shortage of word-of-mouth testimonials of psychological redemption through de-cluttering.
If only it were that simple. Real detoxing, my version, involved shaking, puking, crying, sweating and loads of self-loathing. I did this in 2011, when my life and liver packed up at roughly the same time, through prolonged, excessive intake of drugs and alcohol, and I have to tell you it did not feel good. It did not “spark joy” – a condition for Kondo Millenniums when deciding whether to keep something or throw it out. It felt like shit. Coming down from a lot of vodka and Valium, my alliterative poisons, I wanted, at various times, to run away, get loaded or do something I would regret.
If, somehow, I were able to fix my own life and the lives of my family and friends that I also messed up in that druggy domino effect, just by throwing things out and pushing the Hoover around, I would have done it that way. Instead, through selfishness and isolation, I cut out everyone who was near and dear to me, anyone who got in the way of me and my drugs. I purged myself not so much of things but of people, like my family, including my own children, and my oldest friends. And by the time I was a little bit better, detoxed of the substances but not of the addict mindset, which is all about me, myself and I, ready to present the detoxed version of myself back into the imagined loving, forgiving arms of my dearest, they were sort of done.
I’d messed them up too much, and quite rightly, they didn’t trust my recovery. I relapsed a bunch of times before I was able to accept that true forgiveness would take a very long time, and may never happen.
People in recovery from addiction like the metaphor of cleanliness. We say clean and serene. We talk about keeping our side of the street clean, which means, don’t do anything to piss other people off, don’t do bad stuff, even if they do. You keep your side clean.
So, it made sense to me, post rehab, to clean houses and flats for money, putting other lives in order since I had made such an almighty mess of my own. It was symbolic, and I found it interesting and diverting to clean another person’s stuff, to see what mattered to them. My own mess was no mystery to me and I had no interest in cleaning my own space after doing it for other people for five or six hours a day.
Anyone who has ever had a massive clean-out and felt better for it can understand the basic idea of feeling better for throwing stuff out and cleaning the few joy-sparking things that survived the purge. Visually, it’s very satisfying. Think of the old vacuum-cleaner salesmen who would pitch up on some unsuspecting housewife’s doorstep and throw a bag of soil on her floor, and then clean it all up with the new vacuum. We love those stark before and afters. But cleaning is not healing in itself. It’s a diversion. If you are trying to think deep thoughts, but your eyes keep travelling towards the dust balls collecting round your skirting boards, you won’t have the headspace to address the stuff that’s really bugging you.
In one unwittingly tear-jerking online cleaning tutorial, a fit young woman is ransacking her enormous kitchen, throwing everything on to a sheet in the middle of the room and telling us, to camera à la Fleabag, that she’s doing this because she broke up with her boyfriend and they have to move out. That’s the real mess, not the piles of chia seeds and protein supplements cluttering their formerly joint kitchen cupboards.
If cleaning your own stuff out in a ritualistic way makes you feel better, great. But most big problems are more than dirt deep. Mine were, and even clean and sober, they still are. Twelve-step recovery, a tried and very tested good model for staying off drugs and alcohol, involves doing loads of things that don’t actually feel all that good while you are doing them. So does therapy, if it’s the kind that digs deep, or even the kind that doesn’t – CBT – you still have to do things that you don’t want to do. But to call cleaning a sort of therapy is misguided at best and sorely disappointing at worst.
Clean by Michele Kirsch is published by Short Books at, £12.99. To order it for £11.43, go to guardianbookshop.com
