In which I tell you a secret.

Every time I enter a restroom — public, private, whatever — I tidy it up. I pick up the paper from the floor, dry off the counters, wipe up the soap, flush the toilets in need of flushing, and tamp down the trash so it’s not overflowing.

I’ve been doing this for years now.

It started as a way to break myself of the habit of thinking, “It’s not my job.” I was constantly irritated at work because I kept having to do things that I wasn’t supposed to have to do, and I was constantly irritated at being constantly irritated. I felt helpless and enraged. I didn’t like it. I finally realized that the work itself wasn’t really the problem: the problem was my attitude toward the work. So what if your title is Office Manager but you’re running a vacuum cleaner and doing the filing? What difference does it make?

Bathrooms are kinda gross, as you know. You have no idea what kinds of germs are in there, which is why walking into a public restroom that is definitely not yours to clean and tidying it up anyway is very humbling. Not to mention that if you walk into a public restroom with the attitude that it is your job to keep it looking decent, suddenly you want to get that wad of tissues off the floor and that glob of hand soap off the edge of the sink. Instead of seeing it as an uncomfortable, creepy, possibly dangerous environment, you see it as your own problem to fix and you leave it better than you found it.

Cleaning restrooms on the sly (I only do it if I’m alone because I don’t want to talk about it or, even worse, be thanked for it: my ego’s enough of a problem already, thanks) reduces the habit of judging. It rids us of the idea that we’re too good or too important or too clean to touch things. It engenders the habit of taking more responsibility for the world. One begins to realize that, in a sense, everything is her responsibility.

I used to walk into bathrooms and feel contempt: Aren’t these women mothers and daughters? Who the fuck told them it was okay to treat public places this way? Why are they such slobs? Do they treat their own homes this way? Now I just take fifty seconds and clean it up myself. I no longer wonder what’s wrong with the people who use the room and leave it in such a state; most likely they’re drunk or busy or ignorant or whatever, and who cares anyway? Does it even matter? Why someone decided to pull out a stack of paper towels five inches thick and cover them with hand soap is irrelevant. I just clean it up.

It takes moments. It’s easy. It increases the overall coherence of the world. I’ve noticed over the years that bathrooms I use regularly stay cleaner overall, because people become accustomed to seeing them neat and behave accordingly. It’s the Butterfly Effect.

So, there you have it. I pick stuff up off of bathroom floors! That’s my secret. That’s who I am.

Wanna shake hands? 😉