Serious issues with mess, dirtiness and clutter

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Hello. Does anyone have this issue too?
Basically I'm an extremely clean and tidy person, I like to keep my living areas clean, tidy and clutter free. I'm a minimalist with my room, i love it to be nice and roomy, nothing left laying around. Everything is organized and all belongings have a place where it stays and goes back after use. Everything on my shelves like my TV, Xbox, games and so on have to be exactly where I want them, must be straight and the same distance from the edge of the shelf. I use a ruler to do this and can't bare it if something's a millimeter out of line. Any
Mess and clutter confuses and overwhelms me, causing me lots of stress and can even make me loose track of all my daily tasks and chores. I can get upset and depressed over it. This makes life hard when living in a flat with 2 other people who are messy and barely clean up after themselves. They mess up the kitchen with dirty dishes and I find I have to shut the door as seeing it is distressing for me.
Recently we had builders round doing work in my room and I came home from work and had a complete meltdown when I found my room rearranged badly and they were using it to store things for the job they were doing. It took me a day to get over it. I am the same with my work area at work. Mess and clutter are just a big mind f**k to me.

Sorry for the life story

I am nearly the opposite. If everything is put away in sleek cabinets, I don't want to do anything, and I don't know where anything is either. It takes me a long time to remember where I usually put things, so I prefer to have a corner of everything visible. Having my piles upset can be a big problem, as with yourself. Sometimes it is a struggle to create an open table space for a new project.

Your style is a lot more compatible with shared work spaces, provided the others have similar discipline. However, if you have to measure for placements, that's "Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder." If you have to live with it, you can save time by laying down tape, dots, or graph paper to assist in rapid, precise alignment.

There are professions that value your mind-set. I once asked a machinist to drill a hole near the middle of a block of steel. He couldn't do it by eye; he had to measure and get it within a few thousandths of an inch.

Yup, don't like clutter. I get very on-edge and anxious in a messy room. I have a proper place for everything and woe betide anyone who upsets my system lol

Thank you for your reply. I understand your way of workiknowThat sounds to me like what I'd call organised mess, where It may look like mess to others but when you need to find something, you still know exactly where it is. But unfortunately my friends are not the same. I do pretty much 80% of the cleaning and tidying up in my flat. I suppose they may be like you. When I watch a movie with them in their rooms I see the bed side tables are a complete mess, make up, perfume, jewelry randomly scattered all over but they can probably still find what they need. But I may well have OCD. My mum who is also high functioning autistic, I have always suspected her of having OCD. Also I'm not shure if you've seen it but I watched a great movie called the accountant. The main character is a man also with Aspergers / HFA and he has an obsession for perfection also, I could see the exact same trait in him that I have.

I have this problem too! I always thought it was some sort of visual sensory issue, like being overwhelmed by having too much stuff around because it is too much for my brain to process. It’s not OCD unless it causes you severe distress because something bad might happen if you don’t have everything in its proper place. That being said, autistic people often have obsessive compulsive traits, but they are not the same as having actual OCD.

I do wish that someone had shown me the basics of organization. I was in my 40s before I was startled by the news that a friend had a list of her file folders. I have a very hard time classifying things in a way that I can guess later when I need to find them.
My mother was a photographer, and had to have things where she could find them in the dark in her work room. Dad was a handyman, with a dozen projects on the go all the time. Mom treated his shop and my room as "man cave." I learned to dislike clean-ups in high school, where the projects were always interrupted by the schedule. I'm finally learning to tidy up after each project, even if other tools are left out for the ongoing ones. My efficiency sense is finally accepting an occasional retrieval from storage after just minutes without chastising me about a lack of foresight.
Your roommates may see no worthwhile difference between messy and clean, but if you are doing their dishes maybe you can charge. It may help to agree on a rotation for bathroom cleaning, etc. or each may prefer a certain duty.
BTW, One time, I was having trouble finding room for a stick of deodorant in a shared bathroom, so I declared that I was going to clean it top to bottom, and that everyone must remove their shampoo, etc. They bitched, but did it. The cabinets were still over half full of things left by previous residents, so I made a "Free" (or you forgot) box and we all had lots of room.

You probably wouldn't want to share a house with me then!

I find my attitude to mess and tidiness quite perplexing. On the one hand, when I'm making art or music, or writing computer code, my level of perfectionism is ridiculous - I'll waste hours trying to 'fix' the tiniest little thing which no-one else seems to notice, even when I point them out. It's been bad enough to have lost jobs because my perfectionism meant that I could never hit deadlines (too busy 'gold-plating' things, as an ex-manager used to call it.)

Yet at the same time, an overflowing bin or a pile of clutter which forces me to detour around it dozens of times a day will become totally 'invisible' to me once it's been there for a little while - it just seems to become part of the scenery which I unconsciously adapt to; as if it were an immutable feature of the universe that had been there since the dawn of time. However, if someone draws my attention to it, I will see straight away that it might be a problem, and I'm regularly astounded by the things that I tolerate in my environment without seeing them for myself.

You're a bit more extreme on it than me, but I hate clutter and mess too. I have been staying with someone who is a hoarder, and it's hell. There is just sh!t everywhere. Things that have no purpose - old furniture no one uses, broken children's toys when there are no children, stacks of excess tableware, decorative tins with nothing in them, cheap statues of naked cherubs and cats, papers, decorative candle holders, bottles of half-empty condiments, lawn seed and bird seed boxes, body products like creams and powders, chimes, vases and vases of plastic flowers - that is literally what I can see while sitting right here.
In my space, there is not much. Everything is put away, the bed is made, the surfaces are clean and vacuumed, etc.
I don't care about the precise measurements of things from the edges, but everything is put away neatly and I never lose things. I know where everything is.
And this person is constantly trying to shove things into my space because I "have room."

That does make sense I think. I have thought the same thing. I get confused and don't know what to do in a messy room, it can make it harder for me to carry out my after work routine and that causes me stress. But I have always been a very visual person, I look and stare at things for enjoyment that some people including all my friends wouldn't think anything of, for example when I'm driving I have to be carefull around this time of year being Autumn as I find the golden colour of the leaves on the trees is so beautiful I have to stare at them and I become distracted. I have an obsession with staring at things I find amazing, plants, trees, I'll go and sit on the beach and stare at the sea and so on, I think the way I see things visually is different to NT people so it could be sensory. But lately I've to live with my house in a total mess as the builders will mess it up again if I return it to normal. So I've been learning to deal with it