If you’d asked my twelve-year-old self to close her eyes and go to her happy place, she would have done so dutifully: contemplated, ruminated, and then cast herself to the Burbank, California IKEA.
This location is the biggest in the United States, three sprawling stories replete with beds and cabinets and lamps, plus a restaurant that serves the best (and only) Swedish meatballs I’ve ever eaten. Every few months throughout my middle school years, my family would clear out a Sunday, make the hour-long drive down to Burbank, and spend the day perusing furniture. My favorite mug at home was lifted from a display shelf in the kitchen section. I know the multicolored surface of the dining table that my dad has been eyeing (and my mom has been vetoing) for years by heart. Even the cream throw blanket at the foot of my dorm bed was found in the market hall.
Mostly, though, I remember wandering through the showrooms for hours with my sister, each corner holding a new living space designed to perfection. Here, a cozy bed laden with pillows, bright white lights strung up along the walls. There, a mahogany apartment-style kitchen and dining room, the table already set, waiting for its guests.
I’d drape myself across sofas and chaises and imagine myself in a thousand different lives: a young and intrepid journalist in New York City; an accomplished biologist whose studies took her all over the world; an aunt, or a wife, or even a mother—beautiful and brilliant and brimming with fulfilled potential. I’d live in a perfect home, have the perfect job, settle down with the perfect person, show off a perfect body. As my teenage years began to roll by, my family returned to the storerooms again and again, mostly at my request. Anything felt possible in the Burbank IKEA.
—
“Having your home look just the way you want is an amazing feeling that is well worth the effort. If it seems like far too daunting of a task to declutter your home in its entirety, just start with one room. You’ll still feel good and will be more motivated to keep going!”
- Homemakers, “7 Benefits of a Clean and Organized Home”
—
Over quarantine, my parents—like many others—began watching that one Netflix show about Marie Kondo and her meticulous approach to organization. The KonMari method instructs users to begin “tidying by category,” rather than by location. “Keep only those things that speak to the heart, and discard items that no longer spark joy,” reads the webpage. “Thank them for their service—then let them go.”
Trapped at home, my parents took on this task in earnest. My father went diving into the depths of their shared closet, unearthing floral-printed dresses and pinstriped shirts galore, then packing them all into brown bags and sending them off to the donation center. My mother spent days sorting through every bookshelf in the house, handing off all the children’s books to family friends and reshelving the rest. Under our parents’ watchful eyes, my sister and I also took to cleaning our rooms, folding all our clothes and decluttering the floors and complaining all the while.
By the end of our spree, things felt different. Lighter. There was newfound space on the shelves and room to fit board games into the closet. But the more I looked around, the less I really felt at home. Everything was in its proper place, and yet I couldn’t find anything—everything was positioned just so, but it all felt off.
The Kondo method is one of many, many more organizational philosophies. Döstädning, author Margareta Magnusson’s “Swedish death cleaning,” calls for people to get rid of excess possessions so that their loved ones won’t have to do so after their passing. The “four-box method” instructs people to sort their belongings into four categories: keep, store, donate, and discard. And in the “30-day minimalism game,” players must get rid of one item the first day, two on the second day, and so forth.
My family has tried several of these methods, but none have ever truly stuck. Our household seems to hum with a permanent tone of entropy, where the shoes must constantly be scattered across the floor and the jackets are thrown at random atop the couch. Sometimes I wonder what we crave more: the order, or the act of pursuing the order. The picture-perfect home, or just becoming marginally more perfect by being there yourself.
—
“A place for everything and everything in its place.”
- Seventeenth century idiom
—
Late in elementary school, I was diagnosed with idiopathic scoliosis. At the young age of nine, this was not something I understood. The increasing curvature of a backbone, the gradual degradation of the body’s natural symmetry—it only existed in the doctor’s office, at that moment, and faded away as soon as I stepped out.
It wasn’t until middle school that my family and I received worse news: the scoliosis had progressed. The curvature of the spine (the spine, because I couldn’t think about it as my spine, only the) was rapidly growing. The X-rays showed two grotesque bends in the vertebrae running up and down the torso.
I listened to the doctor explain that any further progression would probably warrant surgery, watched him point and gesture at the cloudy white blobs that represented the skeleton on screen. Just a body. Not me, not really. I watched a body slip into a hospital gown, watched the slope of the shoulders—how had I never noticed it before? The right one so much higher than the left—and two weeks later, watched that body slide into a tailor-made brace that locked tightly around the chest, a monstrosity of plastic and velcro hidden beneath a bulky sweatshirt.
Over the next four-ish years, I spent about 20 hours a day in the brace, tucked under layers of clothing to mask it from my friends and classmates. I was afraid that if anyone noticed, I’d be branded a freak, abnormal—my torso a mess of plastic and inhumanity. So I taught myself to be quiet, inconspicuous. In my head, any difference was damning.
The body I wore felt disconnected from the rest of me: just a coat of flesh and skin. I learned to recognize when I looked in the mirror, instantly, how the left side of my chest curved further inward than my right—how everything was just a little twisted, off-center. I learned that there was a proper orientation for a spine and that I simply did not have it.
Mostly, I learned to retreat further inside of myself, away from that shell. I could hate my body a little less if I didn’t treat it like my own.
—
“Sound it out to an empty house
Was it just like you had before?
Savior pulled from an open mouth
Did you want to be something more?”
- Searows, “House Song”
—
Humans like symmetry. HowStuffWorks explains that we enjoy the familiarity of it, the predictability: “Symmetrical objects and images play by the rules that our brains are programmed to recognize easily.” We find shapes in the clouds, constellations in the stars. We hunt for patterns to make sense of everything.
I entered high school in the brace. Throughout my quarantined freshman year, I thought often of IKEA: of beautiful and perfectly-decorated rooms, of the thousands of lives I had pretended to live. I couldn’t change most of the things I didn’t like about our house—the pale yellow walls or the old fraying carpet—and I certainly couldn’t change the asymmetry of my body and all my mismatched curves. But I could change my own room, and so I set about the task with gusto.
Over the course of several months, my bed changed position every week. I taped up posters and pictures in a neat grid on the wall, and strung fairy lights in regular intervals across the ceiling. Pillows proliferated across my sheets. I got half a dozen baby blue storage boxes in varying sizes, filled them with everything from my preteen years, and shoved them all in the back of the closet. But even after twenty-something Pinterest boards and hours of trying to reinvent myself, I stood back and nothing felt like home, nothing felt right. My body didn’t feel like home. I didn’t feel right.
—
“I used to believe in God. This was back when I wanted to be a carpenter, when the only thing I knew grown-ups could do was pave roads and build houses, weld metal into fences or the occasional prayerbook. When I learned they tore them down too, I believed in God a little more.”
- Noralee Zwick, “poem in which I cannot rely on my hands”
—
Eventually, I shed the brace, once the doctor declared the progression of my curves to be sufficiently halted, and finally entered high school in person. I felt freer, to an extent. But for years, I felt myself continuing to flinch away from the silhouette I saw in the mirror. I could still see the ghost of the brace on my torso, the exaggerated inward curve on my left side, the smaller one higher up on my right.
And then all too soon, senior year came. Life began to morph into a series of goodbyes, small at first—our last high school football game, pep rally—and then bigger, and then bigger. Our last day of school. Our last beach trip. Every day I spent at home was a day closer to leaving.
In my room, which had been so meticulously organized throughout the past few years, stuff began to proliferate again. A pile of photo strips from prom and the three teddy bears my friends had given me for my eighteenth birthday. The half-dozen tops we’d bought from the thrift store and tried on together, laughing, crammed into the same tiny dressing room. Birthday cards from my parents and sister, the scrapbook my friend made for me with pictures of all my loved ones, Easter eggs, Hershey’s Kisses.
I tried to rein in the chaos once or twice, but after attempting to organize a “donate” pile and coming up empty, I quickly realized that I didn’t want to. Yes, there were messes appearing on my shelves and my floor, but they were things I desired to hold on to, formless and patternless except for the fact that I loved them all.
We graduated high school; according to every long-winded speaker, our futures were brighter than all the blinding football field floodlights which I cried under. For as long as I could, I clung to my friends, laughing, taking pictures, already mourning the loss of everything I knew.
My robes hung in wrinkled folds off of my shoulders; I’d forgotten to iron them. By the time I got home, my graduation cap had lost half a dozen sequins. I put them both up on the first clothes hangers I could find and then looked at myself in the mirror, all brimming with energy, an earnest sort of hope. My hair was mussed and my body listed, like it always did.
Still, though, the world felt bright. Still, though, for the first time in years, I allowed myself to soften my own gaze upon myself. The future was in limbo; our futures were uncertain. Everything was terrifyingly imperfect, and there was nothing to do but race forward into it all, and that was okay. Maybe my body was part of that everything too.
—
“We assessed four-year-old children’s and adults’ reported aesthetic preferences between symmetrical and asymmetrical visual patterns…Children looked longer at the symmetrical patterns…but they showed no explicit preference for those patterns…calling into question theories that symmetry is a ‘core feature’ mediating people’s aesthetic experience throughout life.”
- Yi Huang et al., Nature.com, “The aesthetic preference for symmetry dissociates from early-emerging attention to symmetry.”
—
Fukinsei is a Japanese aesthetic principle that refers to “the concept of irregularity and asymmetry in design.” Visual, architectural, and other compositional concepts are balanced through elements that might not typically be considered symmetrical or orderly. A commonly-cited example of this is the enso, or the “zen circle,” an incomplete circular brushstroke that represents both the infinity and the imperfection of the universe.
I wonder if it’s possible to achieve fukinsei deliberately, or if it’s something you stumble upon. In cleaning out your closets with your family, sitting amidst piles of discarded old clothing and reminiscing. In teenaged tearstains as you say goodbye at the end of summer, splotched onto the shoulders of each others’ shirts. In the shedding of mussed graduation robes and seeing your own body in the mirror, misshapen, threaded with youth and potential, all yours to learn to love.
—
“Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.”
- Maggie Smith, “Good Bones”
—
Now, I’m finishing up my first year in college. Even though I’m attending my dream school, I am not living the clean and sophisticated life that my preteen self envisioned—not even close. My body is imperfect, my skin spotted with stretch marks and blemishes. My dorm is cluttered and there are close to ten boxes crammed under my bed and almost certainly paper scraps from my lab notebook on the floor.
But at the end of the day, when I put on soft music and change into a tank top and sweatpants, it’s the perfect size to welcome in my friends. They sprawl across the rug in disarray, and I can’t help but join the dogpile of limbs and laughter. We talk about V-Dub dinners and parties and sociology homework.
In the mirror, I catch a glimpse of myself, smudged eyeliner and messy hair. The curves of my torso are not curves that will ever go away. I will live the rest of my life in a state of asymmetry.
And yet. And yet at the end of it all, this body is what lets me sweat after a good run and cup my palms around a steaming cup of jasmine tea and wear pretty clothes and hold my friends’ hands. I’m pulling back my shoulders. I’m growing into these bones.
And I don’t know what my future home will look like, except for the fact that it will be messy. Well-worn couches to welcome in everyone I care about, and flowers spilling out of their pots, and picture frames piled upon every shelf. Soft yellow lamps, laughter, and warm hands. A mirror or two.
