Ransacked

I’ve been putting this post off since Friday, and it’s Tuesday today. I was too angry, panicky and a general mess to blog about it – and I also wanted to be able to keep my calm when writing about what happened.

What happened was this: people came to clean my house.

Also, I apologize in advance… this post is pretty ranty. I’m feeling really frustrated, but writing all of this feels good to get it out.

The landlord of the house I live in was coming to do an inspection for the first time in almost 40 years. I live in a place where it is basically impossible to find a room in a house for under $1,000, and finding a two bedroom apartment/house is going to cost thousands of dollars a month… I just happened to be in a relatively good deal for the area, and the landlord not coming around in a long time helps.

Anyway, my mom went ahead and hired several people to clean my house. I had consented to them helping out with dishes, vacuuming, and general cleaning, mainly because I’m now 31 weeks pregnant and pretty much everything feels difficult and exhausting.

The people who came to clean the house are Wwoofers. Basically, people who go and work on farms and pieces of land in exchange for food and a place to stay.

They “cleaned” the house the day of my appointment, which I had woken up at 5:30 to get to, and by 2 in the afternoon I was exhausted and took a nap. I napped for two hours, and when I woke up, I walked into my living room and found people had moved all my furniture around and were sorting through everything I own.

I walked outside and happened to notice there was an awful large amount of garbage bags, and the trash bins were all full. I looked inside one and began pulling out jewelry I had made (I do resin jewelry). The jewelry I pulled out was previously put away in individual jewelry box and labeled baggies. To throw them out, someone had to go and open each jewelry box and throw them in the trash.

Then I pulled out my zippo, Dolce and Gabbanna sunglass cases, my Vivienne Westwood shoebag, an unused $50 Starbucks gift card, personal letters, writings, packing slips to things that I was planning on mailing out on Monday, etc.. etc…These were just the first things I noticed. Oh, and my entire collection of Iwako erasers, and cute Japanese stationary collection, and squishies.

Basically, someone had gone through my entire house and just started throwing things out as they wanted.

I have an office/craft area, where I have cupboards with plastic boxes with printed labels, and each box contains the things the labels say. I have spent hours color coding and organizing all my craft supplies. They had dumped the entire contents of several of these boxes into the trash, took things out of all of them and put them in other weird places that made no sense. They had gone through literally every single drawer in my house, taken things out of them, and put random items in other drawers around the house. But they didn’t organize anything at all. Nothing was organized, just shuffled and moved around.

I honestly don’t know who organizes a book shelf like this… My books were already put up on shelves and organized. This was just strange to me.

It began feeling malicious when I really started checking things in my house. I had a heart-shaped wooden box that I had painted, and inside of it would write down my wishes or dreams… Someone had dumped it out and filled it with rocks and random pieces of junk.

Then I noticed that my cameras were missing. I had a Canon camera, an HD video camera and a Fuji Instax camera (along with cute Japanese film I had imported) all together, in their original boxes together in a box. They were gone.

I did end up recovering the Canon in the nursery, the other side of the house, on a tray full of beads that should have been in my office, but I still haven’t found the other two cameras. I’m sure they threw out the film, because they seemed to have thrown out everything.

Anyway, I could go on and on about all the things changed, thrown out, broken, disappeared, and screwed with…

But I ended up breaking down sobbing in the driveway, overwhelmed and upset by what had happened.

They got super angry at me, and totally in my face.

One guy was raising his voice to me and had the nerve to lecture me on how “you can’t take that stuff with you when you die anyway!”

Ahhhhh! I was so angry. But I didn’t react with anger. I tried my best to relay why I was upset, but I was just met with bitterness and anger. They were treating me as though they had done me this huge favor and I was just being an ungrateful little brat. I would have happily paid much more money to have a professional clean my house that wasn’t going to throw out all of my things.

After they left I just kept finding more things that bother me. Things like chargers, where I keep my food, makeup, etc. is all messed up and I found in the few days after the house was “cleaned” it’s become harder to cope with.

I’ve been diagnosed with OCD by several doctors, although I don’t think I’ve mentioned this on this blog before, as the agoraphobia has been my biggest focus on overcoming.

My OCD issues tend to mostly center around contamination.

Since all these people were in my house, I haven’t been able to eat the food that they touched, and I haven’t done my makeup, because I keep getting freaked out that there’s something wrong with it. Rationally, I know that it’s fine, but I just can’t bring myself to get over it and use it. I hate that. I love my makeup collection, and I’ve put hundreds of dollars into it over time, because doing my makeup makes me feel amazing and normal on the days when I feel the opposite.

I have a difficult time using things that are opened, or drinking things that aren’t individually bottled where I can hear or see the seal breaking.

It really, really sucks… and I’ve made a lot of progress on it over the years, but things like this just sort of shake up my world and send me into a really chaotic state.

All that aside, I’m actually kind of proud of myself for being able to cope at all, and not melt down completely… although I have had some crying fits of just feeling utterly violated, ransacked and powerless.

Anyway, I think I’m going to stop ranting about what happened now… it does feel better to write about it and get it out. The one thing I have to say that has helped has been my ability to meditate, and that is what I attribute to me being able to stay calm at all. Meditation is amazing, and making it into a daily practice has been one  of the best things I’ve ever done for myself.

Okay, maybe I’m not done. I’ve also come to the conclusion that if you’re going to hire people to clean your house:

• Those people should live in houses.
• Probably only one person should be cleaning at a time so that they are held accountable.
• It’s worth it to hire from a professional cleaning service.
• Don’t let hippies who don’t believe in material goods clean your house.

Okay, I’m done for real now.