Vicious Cycles Of The Housekeeping Variety

1. Turn around one day and realize the house looks like a nasty tornado from White Trash Trailer Park USA swept through it, that you can't take a step without being stopped by a pile, and that every surface of the house is covered in stuff.
2. Spend the week obsessively cleaning it because it's been so long you feel like it needs every nook and cranny scrubbed right now!
3. Get so exhausted by the end of the week because all you've done is clean clean clean to the complete neglect of anything creative so you take a day off.
4. Do a pretty good job the next week maintaining the clean and therefore add back all the other responsibilities in life all at once, with a sprinkling of brand new things you've been wanting to add to your life, because you now feel you've got life handled. Feel pretty good for a week or two and swear to never go back.
   
5. Get increasingly frustrated as time goes on because you worked so hard to reach perfect house status but that takes too much work to do daily and you realize logically it's an unreasonable expectation to place on yourself anyway.
6. Enter the next week with hands thrown up in exasperated surrender unable to believe that no one else in your household holds the same unreasonably high standards.
7. Stop keeping house altogether, it's not worth it if it can't be done to perfection.
8. Rinse and repeat.

I'm currently I'm at step 1 and am trying very hard to break the cycle since it tends to appear in other areas of my life and I'm tired. Just clean like a normal person is the mantra running through my head, pace yourself, slow and steady wins the race... So far so good!