“Hi, my name is Joy, and I have dishwasher control issues.”

That is, I imagine, how I’d come clean to a support group if the opportunity ever arose. Haven’t found a local chapter for this sort of thing yet. But, if and when I do, it’ll probably be in Farmington or further down the mountain, well worth the gas money to find enough dishwasher density per square mile, and the like-minded souls standing sentinel by them. Meanwhile, though, I must rely on my internal psychoanalyst for help.

“Let’s think back on how this issue began to manifest,” she says calmly. “When did you first notice your behavior changing? When did your reaction to your dishwasher start becoming a controlling influence on your day-to-day life?”

I call her Amy, short for Amygdala, as in brain cortex emotional response amygdala, because I rely on her to keep that tiny center of my reptilian brain from transmuting into the Creature from the Black Lagoon. She is serene, soothing, rational, professional but still approachable, and just a tad pushy—my voice of gentle authority and reason. She’s always on call whenever I need her, showing up in her sensible work lady shoes and layer upon layer of “casual Friday” fleece, pen poised over notepad, ready to record, underline, and asterisk as necessary, and, ultimately, organize my situation into an actionable, bulleted list. I’ve never seen her living situation, so I can only guess how she applies all her therapy cred to her outside-the-office self, but I imagine she has no problems nerding out over her dishwasher or with any other appliance fixation detracting from her perfect work-life balance.

But, as Amy herself always says, such assumptive comparisons only detract from figuring out how to live my best life in all its imperfect splendor. “Every soul has dirty laundry. And dirty dishes,” she reminds me, her tone somewhere on the tough love side of touchy-feely. “It’s what you choose to do with your pile, how you respond, that creates harmony…or turmoil.”

I first noticed I might have a problem sometime in my early thirties. Before that, back when my first dishwasher was the size of a trash compactor, I was fine. Operated with one knob, its only custom option being a magnetic faceplate I slapped on to make it match my harvest gold kitchen, I barely gave it a second thought. But later, as my Corelle place settings grew with my family food prep obligations—and the possibilities in my local Sears showroom progressed, seemingly, into Judy Jetson territory—so did the complexities of my absorption. Did I need to upgrade to the model with the control panel that looked like it was designed for the space shuttle command center? Should I do like the TV commercial and cram everything in there and run it every night just to make sure my favorite spatula and fry pan were always at the ready? Or should I implement a just-in-time, hybrid construct based on my low level of aversion to washing things almost as big as the sink right there in the sink? Eventually, I adopted a sink-plus-dishwasher-when-needed approach. But, for whatever reasons, I decided the “when needed” part needed to be calculated and monitored according to a rigorous, but allusive, set of standards. My standards.

“It was almost full, so I just let it run,” I remember Tom saying when I came home one Saturday to the unmistakable sloshing, pumping, and swirling of my dishwasher in mid-cycle.

“How?…Why?” I muttered, not yet able to recognize, never mind admit, feeling any type of way about the situation. I’d only been gone a few hours, long enough for him to dirty one, maybe two, lunch plates and, perhaps, a fork or two. And last I’d looked, there’d been enough viable space in there to handle dinner and, best case, breakfast tomorrow! I bent down, putting one ear closer and, sure enough, the surging already underway in there was suspiciously vacuous, definitely not the sound of sudsy water sluicing over strategic formations of tightly packed dishes.

I yanked the door open mid-slosh, flung my fogged-up glasses on the counter, and craned my furrowed, steamy brow inside as the spray arms rattled to a stop above gaping holes in proper, practical placement. Each rack was like a hollowed-out version of a honeycomb I should never have deserted.

“You call this full?” I challenged, pointing at all the available nooks and crannies, mentally retrofitting a cereal bowl here, a mug there, until I could deem it really, truly, 100 percent loaded. A warm, clean cloud of vindication mixed with a twinge of gratification I didn’t yet fully understand seeped under my skin. And even the beep, beep, beeping of an interrupted wash cycle could not dog-whistle me away from digging in and standing my ground—until later that night when it was, in fact, actually, unmistakably full and I’d proclaimed it so with exaggerated hand gestures and loud, snarky comments. Like if a Price Is Right girl with too much attitude got recast onto an episode of My Strange Addiction, that was me.

“Well…that wasn’t really skillful,” Amy said after I’d calmed down a bit. “Does it really matter if you save a bit in electricity and soap at the expense of people’s feelings? Let’s get you to a place where you’re okay with allowing him to help with the dishwasher, even if it isn’t perfect. Next time, let’s take a step back and remember RAIN.”

Amy likes to remind me about RAIN, not the April showers or the Clapton love song kind, but the Zen wordplay kind that’s supposed to empower me to reign in my crap and focus on self-cleansing. When I feel the queen bee in me emerging to hover over the dishwasher, I gotta hang loose long enough to Recognize, Allow, Investigate, and Nurture what the heck is happening…and why.

“Yeah, I see you, my winged alter ego, making a beeline for the dishwasher. I recognize what you’re all about,” I gotta say. Then I gotta allow the experience to “just be” without judgement and/or drowning it out with worse, unskillful choices until I can investigate it down to its tangled roots and, ultimately, nurture my way toward calm compassion. It’s taken years, but I am getting better at the recognition and detachment-enabling parts of that process. And when I do get triggered and can’t manage to just walk away, I know how to engage in quiet, covert dish reappropriation exercises that are self-soothing and non-toxic. So I guess you could say I’ve moved on to mastering the investigative self-acceptance half of the equation and I’m on the lifelong learning track.

When it comes to investigative introspection, I’m writing the book on How Did I Get the Way I Am?. It’s a self-help autobiographical work-in-progress mystery with so many side annotations that my pre-digital Dark Ages newspaper editors would call it “messy copy”, and my online software support editors would deem it pre-beta, “for internal use only.” Especially the How Did I Get the Way I Am With Dishwashers? chapter. That one’s under constant revision, but I’ve rough-drafted a few hypotheses.

A lot of it, of course, boils down to the ol’ nature versus parental nurture premise. How does the way I naturally came into the world, combined with how I was or wasn’t nurtured, affect my conduct around dishwashers? Well, for starters, my nickname is Fidget. As in the proper noun form of “moving around restlessly, nervously, or impatiently.” Tom gave it to me soon after our first date, back when Dingbat and Meathead were household names and Fidget sounded relatively cute and unabrasive. Most days, he still keeps his tone affectionate when he says “Don’t freak out, Fidget, I ran a load of dishes for you.” Kinda like when Jamie in Outlander tells Claire “Dinnae fash yerself, Sassenach,” and manages to calm her down. I wonder, though, if it wasn’t the 18th century and Claire had to watch Jamie heedlessly loading a dishwasher, whether she mighta just fashed herself back through the stones. Hard to know. Meanwhile, I’m glad my real-life husband stifles his Archie Bunker eye rolls when I go dingbatty over the dirty dishes.

So, yeah, there is a fair share of fidgetation factored into my basic personality, skewing my domestic composure and balance. I’m not your classic neat freak, though. I believe a little bit of clutter has character, that out of sight is definitely out of mind, and clean enough means never going after anything with a Q-tip, an old toothbrush, or any sort of freakish Swiffer arm extension. My housekeeping style is more about sanity than true sanitation, about the pure, fresh comfort I find in the illusion of having control over my surroundings. It manifests in Mug Shui (what my family calls the favorites-first preference with which I select my daily coffee mugs from the cupboard), my penchant for outward-facing can labels (born from my first apartment where no cupboards meant Campbells and the Jolly Green Giant became colorful kitchen accents), and my unshakeable belief that omnipresent police monitor whether or not my bed is made. And by jeezum, doesn’t my fidgetation favor the dishwasher!

But, why, specifically, do I laser in on my GE PowerQuietPlus and not my other appliances? Well, like I said, I have some rough theories. One of my favorite Christmas memories was my mother getting her first dishwasher back in the mid-sixties. My father led her blindfolded out to the garage to behold the miracle of emancipation lying within the giant Sears box. Built-in under the sink wasn’t a thing yet, but Mum was so tickled to be away from the sink that she happily wheeled it over to the faucet and back again. I also remember coming of age during the 1970s energy crisis when, suddenly, “running everything all at once” like a dishwasher and/or lights and a refrigerator made the electric meter on the side of the house churn through dollars like nobody’s business. Back then, nothing was digital or smart about the meter. It was a GE glass-domed gizmo with a perpetual motion horizontal wheel that looked like a mini circular saw buzzing through your kilowatt hours, rapid-fire flipping the black and white numbers display that, come the end of each month, added up to an electric bill that would send shock waves and vows of reform throughout the family. Sometimes I’d find my dad outside peering at the damn thing while it whirred away like a demonic hamster was stuck in it. He’d do the old guy pocket change jingling thing, wishing he could somehow put a couple quarters in there and take some of the sting out. That was right about the time he started blow dryer shaming me into not wanting to come home from college. “Why do you need electricity for your hair?” he’d yell up to the bathroom, suggesting I leave a couple quarters beside the vanity to pay for my vanity. Needless to say, the dishwasher only got powered up when we were down to our last plate and fork.

Eventually, we all calmed back down, but not before I’d made the neural connection that automatic dish cleaning was an indulgence to be approached with reverence and moderation. I got married, got my first house, and graduated up from apartment-sized to family-sized models of my own. Very slowly and methodically, of course, until I made The Big Move to Rangeley to live out my “last (fill in the blank appliance) I might ever need to buy” years in my used-to-be camp cabin.

“You’ve got a dishwasher and a dryyyyyer? At camp?” my mother-in-law said the first time she saw my retrofitted, renovated kitchen. She had this way of overly emphasizing the word dryer so her lips recoiled along with the rest of her, dragging it out to rhyme with “why.” As in “Why does my daughter-in-law need a dryer when there’s perfectly good free air all around her?” To her, energy crisis meant having more than one thing plugged in and, heaven forbid, operating at once. And vacations, she’d remind me, meant “a sink with a better view” and no hot running water. Having evolved along that same path myself—with memories of bathing my babies in a Rubbermaid Roughneck tub filled from the lake, and the unbridled joy of any water finally flowing out of a faucet still pretty fresh—I thought I’d paid my dues, too. But in the eyes of the powerwashing while penny pinching pioneers of the previous generation, I was a bit spoiled. Not Kardashian spoiled, kilowatt-hour spoiled. Because I was upta camp racking up the kilowatt hours like they were S&H green stamps I couldn’t redeem for stuff I really needed.

I’m in a good place now, though, a place of self-nurturing and affirmation where I can honor my legacy and see my dishwasher for exactly what it is: an acceptable extravagance. Fifteen years later, the blush of newness might have worn off the ol’ GEQuietPowerPlus, but it still lives up to its name. Twice a week, of course…no need to go off the rails just because I can. And I think I’m getting my control issues under control. When I feel at all triggered, I admit that, yup, I am a retired technical writer who used to thrive off reordering the messiest, most scrambled engineering puzzles into tidy little procedures. I cut myself some slack when I don’t know what day it is (name or number), but I can tell you, based on a fine-tuned calculation of available slots and crevices, the precise moment my next dish cycle should start. I even kept my world from tilting off its axis during a tough transition to phosphate-free detergent, serenely shifting from my Great Value value-sized bottle of liquid to those teeny tri-colored packets. What, exactly, goes on with those tiny little cubes? Whatever is it, it’s beyond any time-released, super-concentrated phenomenon I’ve ever had to figure out. So, for the most part, I’ve stopped trying.

“The dishwasher doesn’t care,” Amy reminds me if I start to wonder too zealously. “The dishwasher can’t make you feel anchored and validated. You make yourself feel that way by what you tell yourself when you load and unload it.” That helps quiet the back-to-front, top-to-bottom, mug shui first-in-first-out dialogue in my head that’s ever scheming to outsmart my CMP “smart” meter at all costs. For now, anyways. And, on occasion, I’ve also managed to relinquish dishwashing control to Tom and he’s done fine. Just fine. I can even have calm, detached conversations about what used to send me into a tizzy.

“Have you seen what you can do with these new dishwashers?” my girlfriend asked the other day. She was showing off her WhirlpoolTurboTech 9000, and she was in my kitchen, nowhere near hers. “I can auto-start it from this app, monitor its wash and dry time, select speed booster or energy-saving express mode, plus all these other features I haven’t figured out yet, and I can control everything remotely. Home Depot is having a huge sale right now. Sure would make a nice Christmas present if you need an upgrade.”

I leaned away from her phone, drank my coffee from my Tuesday cup, and smiled. “I’m good,” I said, “All set for now.” And I think Amy agreed.

Joy’s blog can be found online at rootedinrangeley.com.