responsibility

when i lived at home i was responsible to keep my room fairly clean and my stuff (interpretted books, bags, shoes, clothes, etc) if not out of sight atleast in an orderly pile. but dishes, vacuuming, cleaning the bathrooms and laundry were taken care of by my mom. they just happened without me realizing it.
Then i get to college, living in the dorms. While i now had to do my own laundry, the bathrooms were cleaned daily and with meals in the cafeteria dirty dishes were wisked away to be cleaned for the next meal. and with no one to tell me to put things away (my roommate had just as much if not more "stuff" than I did) things started piling up until i either took notice or had time to care.
Then I moved into a house full of girls and while we now had to take care of dishes laundry and general cleaning ourselves, if the kitchen was messy or there were shoes, magazines, purses, keys, strewn all over the living room, even if the majority of the stuff was mine it was easy to write off the mess as a joint mess.
now that it's just Adam and I living in a place it's not so easy to walk through the kitchen and see a stack of dishes in the sink or a pile of shoes by the door. I know that if I don't do something about it the said mess will probably still be looking at me tomorrow. This is not to say that Adam doesn't do his fair share of picking things up, but i know that generally half if not more of the mess is most likely mine and if i don't take care of it no one else is going to be picking up behind me. just one more of those realizations that my mom could have tried to tell me but that i couldn't have understood until now.