Writing Prompt #8: Why I Don't Let People Come Over
It's not because I'm ashamed, but there's an adjacent reason...
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who love to entertain guests and those who’d rather file their fingernails with a cheese grater.
I’m the latter.
I suspect my friends would say I’m affable, funny, savvy, good with people. But they might also say I can be flaky, shy with strangers, and a bit of a hermit. I’m not the one who always joins things; I’m the introvert who might show up if the mood suits me.
And I almost never invite people over to my house.
It’s not that I’m ashamed of my house, although sometimes it looks pretty shameful. (I’d blame the dogs, but they can’t help having fur so I guess it’s on me, in every sense.) It’s also not that I hate where I live, although sometimes my yard and garden look pretty unruly. (OK, most times. We’re being honest here, right?)
It’s that I fear being judged.
I remember vibing hard with a particular Cathy cartoon from the early 2000s about house guests. In this case, Cathy’s notoriously judgy mother is coming to visit. As Cathy frantically cleans her place, which is always a mess, her partner Irving quietly suggests that maybe, just maybe, she could let things go. Why not let her mother see that this is how they live?
“Aack! We don’t live like this!” Cathy cries.
But they do, of course. And Cathy feels eternally beset with guilt for the state of her living quarters. She wants to believe she’s a different kind of person with a different kind of lifestyle, but alas, Irving’s gentle truth bomb reveals she’s just plain Cathy, mess and all.
My own house is humble. I live in a 1988 double-wide manufactured home. I’m not ashamed of that; housing costs in the Pacific Northwest are sky high and this is what I could afford with no down payment or generational wealth to my name. My house stands as evidence that I did something big. I broke away from an abusive marriage and moved 2,000 miles West with a fully-packed van, $2,800 in my checking account, and a dream. I started over with nothing and bought a house within seven years. I have a sweet .78 acres of land in a beautiful rural area where bald eagles nest in my backyard and great horned owls hoot a greeting when I’m outside at night.
And yet.
I’m pretty sure my fear of judgment is universal—no one likes to be judged. But my upbringing no doubt heightened my awareness of it as well as my aversion to it.
When I was young, my grandma entertained her card club friends at least once a year as the Sheepshead-playing sessions migrated from one Wisconsin household to the next. When it was Grandma’s turn in the spotlight, she went… a little insane. Not only did her simple mid-mod ranch house—which always looked lived-in if not particularly unclean—have to be sanitized from stem to stern, but something foundational absolutely had to change. Sometimes that meant something as simple as hanging new curtains, but at other times it brought on a full DIY project like wallpapering, painting, or even laying new kitchen flooring.
I was almost always at Grandma’s on card club night because she recruited my mom to help with final preparations, and my mom and I were kind of a package deal. Although we always left before the guests arrived, I remember how pristine everything looked, right down to the little ceramic oil lamp, white with a pattern of pink tea roses, that sat on a handmade doily on top of the mint green toilet tank. It was only put out when company was coming over, like a talisman that said “Something special is happening.” The lamp oil had a peculiar delicate smell I can summon to this day.
My mom hated card club prep. Grandma was anxious and critical, and things always seemed to go wrong. But she laughed through it, too. Both things were true—the annoyances and the joys.
And all this effort, which began weeks before the card club descended, was to prevent one thing: judgment. Grandma cared about what people thought of her home. Her home was an extension of herself, and to have it judged unkindly was unbearable.
Which brings us back to why I don’t let (most) people into my home. I don’t want to spend weeks cleaning. I don’t want to redecorate. I don’t want the stress that comes with the impossible task of preventing people from judging me. And so I only let “safe” people come over. The kind of people who aren’t looking for a reason to turn to a mutual friend and say that the amount of dog hair hiding under my hard-to-clean-under console table was the size of a Guinea pig.
I’ve reached an age where I’m increasingly OK with being exactly who I am, so long as I’m kind, and letting other people either accept me that way or not. But I’m still not fond of criticism, and I’m always going to have ADHD-inspired rejection sensitivity. I simply haven’t evolved to the point yet where I’m comfortable letting people into my private space and saying, “Well, this is what it looks like.”
My home is my sanctuary. My judgment-free zone. It’s the one place in the world where I’m free to relax, away from anyone or anything I have to perform for. There will be dog hair. There will be dishes in the sink. There’ll be clutter, and some recycling that needs to be taken out. The plants will need watering and fertilizing. My winter seed starting setup may have a fungus gnat or two circling. The blankets on the couch will be in disarray. And every now and then, the ADHD dopamine gods willing, I’ll get a wild hair and start rearranging and tidying things.
I’ve come to realize that I don’t have to invite people into my home, even though they welcome me into theirs. I’m not that person. And I’m slowly learning to be OK with not being the hostess with the mostest. I’m simply me.
But I do miss Grandma’s oil lamp.
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