I, The Untidy

The last time I tried to clean my room, I was reduced to hunching on the floor using a mini screwdriver and tub of Shea Body Butter as hammers to nail a thick, cardboard sheet into the back of my particleboard three-shelf bookcase.  Loose pieces of paper surrounded me like forgotten confetti at a giant’s birthday party.  A neon orange Post-it (PRINT LAB NOTES; grandfather, John Wayne, circus dancer; H.P. Lovecraft?) clung to my sweating body as I canvassed the rough beige carpet on my hands and knees, searching for more effective makeshift tools.  I never found any.  I also abandoned the cleaning project.

When I was a child, it seemed that my friends’ parents used bedroom-cleaning as a punishment, to the effect of, “You can’t run around in the field or build that fort with your friends until you clean your room!”  My parents were not such disciplinarians, and I’ve never understood the fuss over the importance of tidy bedrooms.  Maybe it’s because they remind me of hotel rooms. 

Along with rooms in hospitals and insane asylums (though I think they now hold the more politically correct title of ‘mental health facilities’), hotel rooms must be some of the most impersonal bedrooms in existence.  And what is the common denominator of those three places?  They are public representations of personal spaces.

And so, I feel that there is something fake about pristinely tidy bedrooms.  When I encounter them I wonder what the people who live there are trying to hide.  I see desktops unblemished by jewellery, movie ticket stubs, CDs.  I see floors devoid of stray socks, empty water bottles, newspapers.  In a tidy room I see only surfaces and nothing deeper to hint at the person who spends the most private of moments there. 

My parents have always urged me to “never judge a book by its cover.” But I still peruse the aisles of Chapters and loudly proclaim that if romance novels want to be considered legitimate literature they should start by banishing those surrealistic, colour swirl covers featuring nipple-bearing characters.  And despite my parents’ best efforts, plus fifteen and a half years of education, I can’t help but qualify people based on appearance.  Sure, once I start to learn the details of a person I begin to disregard my initial assessment, but the person I only pass in the mall or on the street will always just be “That bulgy-eyed chick with spidery lashes that looked like a Tim Burton character.” 

Since I know others also make these judgments, I do not wish people to enter my bedroom and exclaim, “My, this bears a striking resemblance to the Marriot I just stayed in!”  I want them to see my room and think, “A very interesting person must live here.”  So while I like my room to be tidy because the minimalist aesthetic is pleasing, people can’t see how intriguing I am when all of my possessions are hidden.  Yes, it’s problematic to base who I am on what I own, but those are the things I have surrounded myself with and they reflect my interests.

I have also discovered that tidiness is hardly practical.  On occasion, I try to cleverly store everything in boxes and binders or behind curtains, like an old-timer hiding her treasures around her house.  This keeps my possessions out of sight so that people can’t access them, can’t know of their existence.  But like that old lady, I too am helpless to find these items when I need them. 

Maybe I’m just defending my dishevelled room so people won’t see it and assume I’m a disorganized slob.  Maybe this defence is undermining my argument that “tidy equals fake” by proving that my untidy room is just another façade.  And yet, my books are ordered on shelves from tallest on the outside, down to the shortest in the middle.  They look good, and the majority of the weight is distributed away from the vulnerable midsection.  DVDs and CDs are alphabetical by title and artist, respectively.  Shirts in my closest are arranged in order of increasing sleeve length.  I like to be in control so I implement organizational structures.  That’s just who I am.  Being that my bedroom is my personal space, it is a tool of expression, just like the clothes and movies it contains, and I can use this tool in two ways.

I can use my bedroom as a mask.  The surface would be white and smooth, the eyes bright yet emotionless, the lips painted red without smudges or bleeding colour.  Or, I can use my bedroom as a display window.  Various items would be scattered around the room with little title cards saying, “This is her real favourite movie,” and “Who needs this many Ziploc bags and Post-Its?!”

If I want to wear a mask every day, I must take care to never allow it to slide down as my face sweats with the guilt of lying.  I must track my lies so that I can retell them, create back stories, so I don’t accidentally say, “I was dancing to ‘Take On Me’ in my underwear last night!” when everyone thinks I’m a music snob who only likes jazz.  I’m always in such a rush that if I tidied my room every time someone might see it then I wouldn’t have time to search the internet for synthesizer-laden ‘80s tunes.  I try to avoid being fake because, if nothing else, it is a full-time job.  I have the attention span of a sugar-saturated youngster raised on video games, and a short term memory comparable to Leonard’s in Memento.  Being fake is hardly practical.

Of course, I cannot make so lofty a claim that I am entirely genuine, nor can I say that I have entirely given up on tidying my room.  I only hope that my untidy room does not turn into the façade I continue to argue against every time I look around at the personality-bearing array of items.