When I was at uni I lived in a flat with four other students. It was a wonderful old house, and we had a great time living together. The place was always a mess, bordering on filthy, but it didn’t matter. We were too busy socialising and working and studying and growing up to care.

Later I travelled and shared various flats with a couple of friends. We never had fixed systems for cleaning up, everyone would do bits and pieces here and there, and it seemed to work out OK. Sometimes I’d get frustrated, usually on Saturday mornings when I’d pick up or do a little cleaning, and I’d feel like I was the only one who ever did anything. I wasn’t a student anymore, and I didn’t want to live like one. I was sick and tired to coming home to a tip. If only the other people who lived there weren’t such slobs and would pick up after themselves.

In my late 20s I got a little flat of my own. It was in a fantastic area – in a beautiful central city street, close to the river and the park and fabulous shops – it was a tiny flat in a building that was waiting to be pulled down and rebuilt, which is how I could afford to live there. It was wonderful to have my own little space. It would be a cosy little haven with no one else to worry about. However a strange thing was happening. I was still coming home to a tip.  It took me a little while to figure it out – there was no one else living there I could blame. I was the slob.

I moved on and had a family and forgot about my cosy little flat. Now I was permanently living with three other people, and two of them at least were impossible to live with. They threw food, they messed up clothes, sometimes several outfits a day, they left pieces of Lego and My Little Ponies in strange and unpredictable places. As the years passed the nature of the mess changed (half-finished science experiments, endless paper dolls, extensive rock and shell collections), but the complaint in my head did not. Other people live here too – they can pick up for a change.

Then I remembered my little flat. I stopped blaming other people for the mess and paid attention to what I was doing. I wanted to make sure that I was picking up after myself before I started blaming others.  I noticed that finishing tasks and putting things away, even after all these years, still wasn’t something that come naturally to me. I was still a slob. OK, not the only slob, but I was kidding myself when I was blaming the entire mess on my husband and kids.

Don’t get me wrong – it can be incredibly hard when you feel like you are constantly picking up after other people. I have cried (more than once) from frustration with this. At times I have felt like I’m in some kind of dark fairytale – Rupunzel spinning away in the room with the endless straw – that every time I  finish (finally!) getting a room halfway decent malevolent pixies rush in  immediately to scatter their mess around and ruin my hard work.

There are positive things you can do to encourage/train/force the people you live with to take good care of the space you live in, but start with yourself first. Gently observe. Hopefully you’ll discover that you’re a little bit of a slob, which is so much better than discovering you are, after all, blameless and perfect. If you’re a little bit of a slob you can give up wishing those other people could pick up after themselves for a change, and start the challenge of learning to pick up after yourself.