My Room, My Mess, My World
A messy room, a desk overflowing with books, colored notes, old photographs, dried flowers and more than one cup of coffee, is not synonymous with a chaotic life. Sometimes, the disorder of a space is the harmony of a creative mind, it is our essence and the logic of a chaos where we feel identified: it is our private world.
Throughout our lives we have been instilled in the need to be orderly, because order is control and, in turn, an orderly environment fosters a certain sense of security. All this is still true, however, something that we tend to do very often is to conceive of disorder as an essentially negative dimension. Disorder is for many the essence of failure, inactivity, laxity and abandonment …
Believe it or not, there is a true psychology of disorder. It is a scientific trend specialized in analyzing what lies behind this behavior and these traits. The “University of Minnesota”, for example, has concluded that a cluttered space enhances the creativity of its tenants. However, this data has many nuances that we will reveal to you.
The psychology behind the clutter
We will start by explaining a really curious fact. Tracey Emin is a British artist who in 1999 presented a work to the world as exceptional as it was shocking. It was just a messy bed. In it, there were clothes, cigarettes, handkerchiefs, vodka bottles … The whole set, far from being aesthetic or attractive, represented a personal drama. That time that anyone has suffered when their emotional life is adrift.
For that work entitled “My Bed” he was a finalist for the Turner Prize, but in 2014, Christie’s in London auctioned the composition for 2.5 million pounds. Modern art is a challenge, but what the artist herself later declared after the uproar caused after the auction, is that she herself usually works regularly in such messy environments.
A work published in “The New York Times” reached the same conclusion, where it was shown that sometimes, a slightly disorderly environment causes the mind to free itself from conventions and to move in all directions to create new responses, new ideas. Nor can we forget that within the phases of creativity, there is that “brainstorming” where from among the chaos, decision arises and, consequently, innovation.
Be that as it may, the conclusion we must reach is that a messy room is not the reflection of a person with a chaotic and irresponsible life. Like someone who cares about order and control in his private spaces and things, he does not suffer from any mental disorder nor is he the reflection of an anankastic personality.
Each of us inhabits our private spaces in our own way and in freedom. Every corner is the reflection of our habits and customs and for that reason we should not receive criticism or a label. It is often said, for example, that disorderly people lack goals, that they have different internal conflicts and that they do not usually throw anything away because they feel a sick attachment to their memories of the past.
This type of “popular wisdom” is not always correct and if today we get up and choose not to make the bed or fix the house, it is because we may choose another priority at that moment. It doesn’t have to mean anything. The disorder that is chosen, that is controlled and does not overwhelm, far from being noise, is calm for a mind that identifies with its possessions.
