Why can't you be like everyone else?

"How hard can it be to just pick up after yourself?"

I heard myself say it before I could stop it. My daughter looked up at me and I recognized the look — I'd worn it myself for years. I'd like to think I do a slightly better job than my mother did. I call her room a mess, not a pigsty. Progress, right?

But the voice is the same. And the belief underneath it — that some people are simply born unable to function — that one stuck around in me for a very long time.

I am a mess

I didn't just believe my room was messy. I believed I was a mess. Broken. Misplaced. Missing whatever it was that everyone else seemed to have been born with.

This was long before words like "neurodivergent" or "autistic" were part of my vocabulary. Back then the explanation was simpler and crueler: I just wasn't trying hard enough. Or I wasn't good enough. Or both.

I remember sitting in my room, five months pregnant, in my wedding dress, surrounded by makeup and papers and pins scattered across every surface. I laughed it off. He knows what he's getting himself into. Easier to make a joke than to sit with the shame of it.

Just try harder

Despite believing I was deficient — not as smart as others, hopeless at the things "real women" were supposed to manage — I still had ambitions. Dreams. An annoying refusal to give up entirely.

So I tried. Before my first daughter was born, I threw myself into nesting. I ironed tiny baby clothes. Folded them into perfect piles. Found them all their places. It felt like performing a version of myself I'd always been told I should be.

It didn't last. Between a newborn and freelancing to keep the lights on, the performance fell apart. The "you should be"s and "why aren't you"s started again. Luckily, I was too exhausted to care.

Get help

Eventually I found a cleaner. It wasn't perfect — nothing ever is — but on the days she came, something lifted. I could breathe. I could be with my daughters. I could work.

Then one day she was unavailable and the agency sent a replacement. The woman barely crossed the entryway before she stopped, looked around, and said: "I can't work in this house."

I stared at her. "What do you mean? Is something wrong with it?"

She pulled out her phone and showed me photos of the homes she usually cleaned. Pristine apartments. Perfect arrangement. Her posing in the middle of it all, smiling.

I asked her to leave. The agency apologized, offered a discount, sent my regular cleaner back.

But I couldn't shake what had happened. Someone I'd invited in to help me had looked at my home — at me — and found us unacceptable. And somewhere beneath the anger, a quieter voice agreed with her.

Not broken. Different.

Life moved on the way it tends to — across borders, through a difficult marriage, into new beginnings I hadn't planned for. My mother-in-law tried her best to teach me all the things my own mother apparently hadn't. She catalogued my failings with a kind of thoroughness that I'd almost have admired if it hadn't been directed at me.

But I already knew I was a mess. What was one more confirmation?

It was somewhere in the middle of all of it — the exhaustion, the unraveling marriage, the long Swedish winters — that I stumbled across the concept of neurodiversity. I pulled it onto myself and it fit like a glove.

I don't know if I need a label. But I needed that moment of recognition: I am not broken. I am different.

And if I wasn't broken — if the wiring was just different, not defective — then maybe I wasn't doomed to live in chaos either. Maybe "can't clean" was never a personality trait. Maybe it was just a skill I'd never been taught in the right way.

It's just a skill

I started small. I made my bed every morning. That's it. It sounds almost embarrassingly minor, but it gave me something to come back to — a thread of order I could hold onto when everything else felt loose.

From there, slowly, things shifted. I started to understand that cleaning isn't about discipline or willpower or some innate quality that tidy people are born with. It's a system. A set of behaviors. Tricks that work with how your brain actually functions, not against it.

The real work wasn't learning how to clean a bathroom. It was letting go of the identity I'd been handed. The one that said I was the kind of person who lives in a mess. The one that made shame feel like a natural consequence of who I was.

The real work

I spent years figuring out that before any system can help you, you first have to believe you deserve to be helped. That you have to stop performing a version of yourself that was never real in the first place.

The mess was never the problem and neither me nor you have to be like anyone else. Let's stop carrying beliefs that were handed to us before we were old enough to question them — and start slowly, unglamorously, building something that actually works for us.

I'm still figuring that out. But I'm done apologizing for who I am. That's new. That counts.