For as long as I can remember I have been a perfectionist to the extreme. I over-involve myself, become over-worked, and in conjunction with my personality, this causes great stress and anxiety. When anything goes wrong in my life I tense up and stress out. This is the story of my liberation from an evil, conniving, manipulative, ensnaring enemy, myself.
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Cleaning Checks. The physical manifestation of Hell in the life of every college student. Unfortunately they are one of the evil necessities of being young and living on your own and thus I plodded on, or more like scrubbed and brushed and soaked and scraped and wiped and dusted on. The detail required to properly fulfill each duty was incredible! One could not simply grab a wet wash cloth and wipe down the soiled surfaces of the stove—Oh no!—that would be much too easy. A Reader’s Digest version of cleaning procedures for the stove and oven are as follows: “Wipe out all crumbs and spills using a white scrub pad, warm water, and 409. Rinse and dry completely. Wipe down the rest of the stove/oven surfaces, inside and out, with a damp rag to remove spills and crumbs…Clean oven window with Windex inside and out. Pull out oven drawer and clean inside and out with 409.” Thus was my first task on that fateful day, and needless to say it took me nearly two hours to clean that stove to the best of my abilities (and the insane requirements), and found myself quite pleased with the sparkling appearance of that particular kitchen appliance. I set the oven on self-clean and proceeded onto my long list of duties.
The cleaning activities continued on for nearly the entire day. I began to see a light at the end of this never-ending house purification ritual and sauntered on into the kitchen. I glanced at my beautiful stove feeling my lips pull up in a smart-alecky smirk of satisfaction, but something much in contrast to the beauty of my excellent work caught my eye and I beheld something terribly wrong. Next to the stove was an avalanche of bubbles spewing forth from our dishwasher!
“BECCI!” I screamed, voice liquid with fury, “What did you do to the dishwasher?” The tenor of my angry words was a beckoning call to the rest of my roommates and they poured into the kitchen to witness the cause of my dire distress.
“I didn’t do anything,” said Becci defensively hesitant.
Ally’s voice came from the corner of the kitchen, “I ran the dishwasher.”
Anger began bubbling in my throat like a hot spring in Yellowstone and my words came out like the hiss of a snake.
“What kind of soap did you put in the dishwasher?”
Ally made her way through the spreading suds and selected the orange Joy dishwashing soap, not the white bottle of dishwasher detergent.
“Are you kidding me?!”
“What, it says dishwashing soap?”
I viciously lunged for the bottle in her hand ripped it from her grasp and waved it in her slightly bemused face yelling, “Yes, Ally, dishwashing soap for like hand washing dishes- NOT to put in the dishwasher!” My frustration was exponentially mounting while my voice proportionally rose. I continued to lob malicious accusations at Ally and to my befuddlement, Ally simply looked at me without the slightest indication of guilt and failure as my face would have rendered if I had been in her position.
As my roommates and I took in the situation and realized Ally’s simple mistake of confusing the types of soap, my eyes narrowed in disgust. Seeing the gloriously clean stove becoming tainted with bubbles, caused my eye brows to become subjects of gravity, creating ugly wrinkles on my forehead and my head nearly exploded with frustrated rage. But then the most unexpected sound—or at least unexpected to me in my frazzled state of mind—met my ears: laughter. Each and every one of my roommates had succumbed to hysterical laughter. Some of the girls literally crumpled with laughter as they saw the hilarity in the situation, but their peals of laughter felt alien to me. While they seemingly went insane I simply stood there, palms upturned toward Heaven, all expression absent from my face completely dumbfounded as I attempted to understand the current scene of events as they unfolded around me.
This laughter hit me like a bulldozer. It thrust my mind into a state of bewildered confusion. I could not comprehend how this scene before me could equate to laughter. My mind ran amuck with hundreds of thoughts all coming to my attention simultaneously. How is this funny? This isn’t funny! Our clean kitchen is being invaded by corrupt bubbles! What if this damages the dishwasher? We can not afford to replace a dishwasher! Why would she put Joy in the dishwasher—that’s like a known bubbly soap! Frantically, my mind spun out of control trying to somehow gain control in this absurd state of affairs. I felt so disoriented. But then upon seeing Ally, with eyes so squinty, laughing at her own mistake, everything became illuminated.
I was liberated from my self-constructed walls of perfectionism—laughter too sprang from my lips and the blinders were lifted from my eyes as the hilarity of the situation became apparent. The wall that had kept me frozen in place and time was broken and I experienced the understanding all my roommates had felt moments before. This was ridiculous! Ally had placed the wrong kind of soap in the dishwasher and now there were bubbles oozing out all over the floor! We were truly experiencing one of those “movie moments,” when life simply does not go according to plan and the only way to handle the unforeseen twist is just to laugh. Bubbles oozing out of a dishwasher was not some tragedy. No one was hurt; nothing had been damaged. We simply had bubbles pouring out from a kitchen appliance that should not have bubbles coming out of it at all.
Our laughter subsided enough to allow air to refill our lungs and then we decided that something had to be done about our current catastrophe. Opening the dishwasher was like opening a Christmas present of bubbles and suds including the atmosphere charged with excited curiosity. The bubbles filled the entirety of the dishwasher and had kept perfect form, remaining in a square shape although the door was no longer containing the bubble to the confines of the kitchen appliance. After removing the bottom rack we used mixing bowls to extract the bubbles. We decided to find the silver lining in our unusual predicament; the floor had yet to be washed so we used the bubbles to our best advantage as our cleaning solution. We then proceeded to transport the bubbles from the dishwasher directly onto our filthy floor.
However, bubbles on the floor of a dormitory kitchen turned the residents of said dorm into little children on the first day of snowfall. Basking in my newfound liberation I flung my bucket of bubbles onto my roommate who was standing directly in front of the Taj Mahal of stoves and doused my magnificent work of art in the remnants of our dishwasher catastrophe! Gasps from the girls rippled through the room as they saw the bubbles vandalize my pride and joy (I had made it no secret on how hard it was to clean that stove into perfection). These shocked exclamations were intensified as the bubbles began to sizzle like bacon as they made contact with the stove— remember, the oven was running on auto-clean mode and was subsequently scorching hot! Ten eyes watched me as I dismembered paper towels from their roll with ferocious power and ran to my dear child. Their eyes showed fear of my reaction. My roommates are no strangers to my perfectionist personality and they all subconsciously removed themselves from my path of rage and fury. But they had not recognized themselves as my liberators; my roommates had not witnessed the change that had taken place within me. The steam arising from the hot stove and rupturing soap suds did not cause one of the mini heart-attacks that normally plague my body at the first sign of disturbed peace. I simply went forth to salvage as much of the stove as possible while internally laughing at myself, at my discovery, and at the very bubbles themselves.
Prior to this turning point, my life had been defined and restricted by my paralyzing perfectionism. When a toddler my parents thought I was deaf when I reached the age of two and still was unable to speak. After consulting experts they knew that I was a normal hearing child and that perhaps I just did not want to talk. A few months later, as I say on my changing table while my mom dressed me in a cute pink dress I whispered “wrain.” Rain. It was my first word and when it only left my lips when I was convinced it would be flawless. From that day on my mom claims that I have never stopped talking. I had refused to talk, even with the encouragement of young parents to prod me along, until I knew that I could do so perfectly. Even from the youngest stages of life my perfectionism ruled my actions.
After my epiphany and subsequent liberation, the nature of the bubbles was actually altered. Corrupt bubbles were no longer attempting to take over my kingdom of Tidy Kitchen. Rather, as my roommates and I continued to frolic in our silly mishap, it became just that: a silly mishap; it became impossible for me to see it as a catastrophe or a great hindrance to our house cleaning. My new freedom allowed me to feel the slimy goo of soap suds slither through my toes and enjoy it. We flew across the slick linoleum floor coated in bubbles like penguins indulging in the small break from our back-breaking house cleaning. The bubbles ended up on all sorts of places rather than the intended destination of the floor. MaCall decided to try a gender change and become a miniature Santa Claus complete with the signature white beard, but this time a bubble beard! I laid down in my jeans and t-shirt in the middle of the still unclean kitchen floor and moved my arms and legs in great arcs, up and down, up and down, with soap foam coating my arms in a silky film. I felt so free—free from the prison I had erected around my own heart and brain.
The bubbles came to represent more to me than mere spheres of soap and water. They became my American Flag, my Statue of Liberty, my Declaration of Independence. Granted, the bubbles themselves did not hand me a certificate declaring my liberation from perfectionism or fight an internal revolutionary war on my behalf, but they were the instrument to enable my self-liberation. Remember the Alamo, Remember the Bubbles!
