LPT for when you live with people who get upset by your messiness

This is something I discovered recently and it works great for me. I'm messy by nature, I have low standards and also the ADHD doesn't really help because I can literally walk into a room and not notice the piles of crap looming at me. Plus the forgetfulness, the distractability and other things.

My husband is way more tidy than me and he gets fed up when he spends ages making the house look nice and I just breeze into a room leaving a trail of destruction and discarded objects behind me. Okay, that's understandable. And I feel terrible about it. So I've tried for a really long time to not do that, and been mostly unsuccessful, and it makes him feel like shit.

The thing I've changed which has really made a difference is this. Whenever I drop something where I'm standing, or notice something which I'm about to walk away from or encounter the thought "Ah, I'll do that later", I say out loud, or if someone is around I whisper or say in my head clearly "Fuck you Steve", with Steve replaced by the actual name of my husband.

Then I usually startle and look back and think wait, wait, no! I don't want to say "Fuck you Steve" here. And I clean up my shit. Sometimes I do it resentfully, sometimes I think, ugh, I can't believe Steve insists on this, but I do it, it usually takes less than four seconds, and then I go along with my day. It doesn't catch everything, it doesn't for example catch the things that I genuinely don't notice, but it's surprising the amount of things that it does catch that I always thought I didn't notice that it turned out I was noticing, actively ignoring and then immediately forgetting about.

It turns out that all of this time, despite him telling me repeatedly that when I undo his hard work he experiences it as a giant "fuck you", and me taking that on board and feeling terrible about it at the time we had the discussion, at the time of actually doing the action I was perceiving me leaving the mess as a neutral action. If I actually went to the effort later to clean it up, I even considered that a positive and felt crappy when he didn't acknowledge it! But when I label the action at the time it happens with what it is - a fuck you, a negative - then I'm making a clear choice between leaving it in the negative state and cleaning it up, restoring it to a neutral state. I no longer expect recognition for this because I'm clear that it's a neutral action. But because it's a change, I am getting occasional thanks for it anyway, which is nice.

TL;DR if you notice yourself leaving your shit around the house or leaving a mess after you did something, say out loud or in your head "Fuck you, wife/husband/roomie" every time you notice yourself doing it. Turns out labelling an action as a clear negative makes you stop and think about it.