The House and the Body
I've been trying to talk more about the idea of a house being alive in its own right, but what I've actually been thinking about lately is a house as a metaphor for the body. This is something more than one person has mentioned to me when I talk about my feelings about the house. I get territorial about who goes in the house the way I get territorial about who gets close to my body. I feel ashamed of problems or messes in the house the way I feel ashamed if something in my body doesn't match what I think it should be (and this is not to say that body shame is okay, just that I'm still at a stage of development where I feel it a lot).
I take house things personally, in other words! I project a lot of my own shit onto them.
I was thinking about this a lot as my ex came by to take the last of his stuff from the garage this week. It was fine, and good to get that step over with, but it brought up a lot of feelings about the history of the house and how far it still is from what I envision. I've cleaned it right up and made many improvements, but it's hard not to see the broken and unfinished things that remain.
"I feel like garbage," I said on the phone to my girlfriend afterwards. I meant literal garbage, like the scattering of trash that was still left after he took the items he cared about. I was talking about the house, but I was talking about me. My own body revolted me.
We did a visualization exercise. I noticed immediately that the parts of the house where I spent a lot of time, where I felt safe and at home, were much easier to visualize than the others. My feelings don’t only color how I react to the things I perceive, but how I perceive them in the first place, how easy they are to remember and understand.
We visualized what the garage will look like when I've swept it out and taken the last of the garbage to the dump, fixed the messed-up garage door, given the space a new coat of paint.
“Maybe garbage is a part of the process of living,” she said. She mentioned religions that have goddesses of garbage and impure things. “Maybe garbage can even be part of something sacred. Or maybe it’s not garbage at all. Maybe it just needs a little fixing up.”
There's a lot of discourse about hyperempathy, which is one of the mechanisms that underlies autistic animism. A lot of people say that hyperempathic people don't actually sense emotions any better than a regular person. We just project our crap onto everyone really hard and assume our projections are true. I don't think that this is the whole story, but it has a grain of truth. Everybody projects. When you feel more, maybe you project more. The house is alive in some sense, but I genuinely don't know how the house feels right now. I know how I feel. That's where we have to start.
I never really thought of hyperempathy as being better at sensing feelings, OR as projecting more onto other people. I mostly just thought of it as taking others’ emotions more seriously, or maybe as being less able to distance ourselves from what I think others are feeling. Just because it’s more vivid doesn’t mean it’s either more or less true.
That said, I also have all this baggage about dirtiness and cleanliness specifically, not only about places but about anything that can be dirty or clean. There’s this entrenched conceptual metaphor in our culture that Clean Is Virtuous and Dirty Is Sinful, and there’s actually been studies that have looked into this kind of thing- the Macbeth effect is where people made to feel guilty supposedly have a stronger desire to literally clean themselves, and where washing your hands actually alleviates that guilt somewhat. Granted, I think that finding has failed to replicate, but in my own life, observing myself and the people I know, I observe something similar to that effect. It’s not I see very clean people are morally better in any way; actually the three most self-righteous, morally-judgmental people I’ve ever known have also been the most cleanliness-obsessed and germaphobic. And on the other hand, I’m pretty messy- I used to be much worse when I was very depressed- and I see this as tied to the way I often put up with too much BS from both the people in my life and myself. Essentially, I see this kind of physical-world-to-identity link that’s maybe similar to yours, but I’m specifically aware that mine is about how the amount of mess I’m willing to tolerate in my room, or the stains on my clothing, or the disorganization in my school binder, is directly related to the extent to which I’m willing to just accept it when others disappoint or frustrate me, or I disappoint/frustrate myself. I don’t LIKE mess, but when I see something that’s too messy it’s easier to feel depressed and de-energized by it, rather than fired up and motivated to change it. Again, this is changing in the past few years, but it’s still a part of me to some extent.
So it’s interesting to me that there are religions where garbage is holy. In other places, maybe they have very different relationships to these ideas of clean and dirty! And it’s also interesting to me that I took a wider cultural metaphor that says Clean is Virtuous and mentally reframed it to Clean is Morally Intolerant, because of the experiences I’ve had probably. Or maybe I always believed that and it shaped the experiences I had and the way I remember them?