For about two years, I had a rule nobody knew about. No one comes inside.

If a friend wanted to visit, I would meet her out. A coffee shop, her place, the park. Anywhere but here. I kept an excuse ready for every occasion, and I hated every single one of them.

The truth was uglier than any excuse. If someone came in and needed the bathroom, they would see it. The grout gone grey. The stains I had scrubbed at until my arms gave out, that never came clean no matter what I tried. 

And I was certain they would think the thing I had already decided about myself: that a woman who lets her home get like this has let herself go.

It sounds dramatic. It was not. It was quiet. My whole world slowly shrank down to the few rooms I could keep presentable, and a front door I stopped opening.

What kept me trapped there was the quiet belief underneath it all. I thought this was my fault.

That somewhere along the way I had let myself go. That other women just had some discipline or some energy I had run out of. Every grey grout line felt like one more piece of evidence against me.

And my body had started agreeing with the verdict. Scrubbing on my knees left my back sore for days, and that bone-tired feeling would settle in after one room, until I had nothing left for anything else. 

So I did even less. And the less I did, the louder the voice got. You are failing at the one thing everyone else seems to manage just fine.

I had it exactly backwards. It took me embarrassingly long to see it.