@sojournthemoon
The most popularly mentioned symptom of hypersensitivity is thinking or feeling that things are polluted when they aren’t. But it’s not the only one. Many hypersensitives also have “obstructed melioration”, where – especially if something is actually polluted or actually has something on it – they are so paralyzed by their feelings of disgust that they can’t take actions to clean.
You can be diagnosed with some forms of hypersensitivity even if you never make a mistake on a test of pollution identification. If you can’t touch the dishes so you can’t wash the dishes; if you can’t stand the smell of dust so you never jack up the couch to sweep it up; if something spilled in your fridge last month and you haven’t been able to open it since then even though it was only ketchup at the time, so now it’s a mold ecosystem you’d need to go after with bleach? If you have a meltdown every time you visit the bathroom and spend two hours sitting there panicking and procrastinating on cleaning up because that would mean thinking about it? If you can’t wash your hands because you’d notice the slightly less clean water rinsing off them? If you haven’t shampooed in six weeks because whenever you wash your hair it accumulates in the drain catch and then you’d have to pick it out? If you have any trouble explaining what needs doing to a professional cleaner because the words taste bad? Then you’re (insofar as you can be diagnosed online) hypersensitive.
If something is so gross that you can’t clean it – not because there aren’t enough gloves and masks and chemicals, just because you can’t stand to think about it that hard, engage with the existence of a mess that needs to be cleaned up – then that’s hypersensitivity, and it’s a disability.
Anyway, how do you all feel about cleaning reds?
#unreality cw? #yet also‚ at the same time‚ very true #I think about this post every fucking time I flinch away from cleaning my fridge #(today’s reblog brought to you by my brother finally throwing out the ~month-old corn that was‚ in his words‚ “no longer yellow”) #(I soaked the bowl with lots of soap for a day or so and managed to clean it after that) #(…now I just need to clean the *other* moldy food container‚ currently sitting beside the sink with its lid on) #(……maybe I will wash the other dishes first)
Update:
About twelve days later, my brother came home with a takeout container from his workplace. He mentioned he was planning to recycle it once he was done with it, because “we already have enough containers”.
I proposed that we instead recycle the moldy one and wash the new one, and everyone with a stake in the matter agreed. (That is to say, I did not bother to ask Dad because I knew he wouldn’t care.)
All’s well that ends well.
(In my defence, I’ve been covering a *lot* of shifts at work the past few weeks (especially those couple weeks), and had a lot less time and skin-HP [link] for dishwashing than usual. At no point during those twelve days was I caught up on all other dishes.)
Tags:
#oh look an update #reply via reblog #(ish) #in which Brin has a food poisoning phobia #domesticity #in which Brin has a job #food #unsanitary cw #Amenta RP #unreality cw?
Brinens and Things 
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