Thoughts Behind: Neatness
Right now my room is an absolute mess. I guess being neat is just not something I’m good at. What about your room?
Maybe it’s still decorated for the holidays or maybe you, unlike me, keep it clean. What about the paint on your walls? What color is it? Honestly, the only reason I’m asking is because of the huge hole I accidentally punched in mine the other day with a chair. Instead of being panicked, which I should’ve been, I was shocked. Instead of being just entirely blue paint, there was also a shade of yellow. Now, I knew the blue was there but beyond that, it wasn’t something I’d ever paid attention to. Until I saw that yellow and the only thing I could think or feel came down to one thought: Why? Why do we feel the need to fill some insatiable part of us with something to define ourselves? Does the color of our walls define us, our way of life, our sense of self? This all sounds really melodramatic but I want you to think about it, just for a second. Think about the pictures you hang up on your walls, about the color of your walls. Do they not, in some small – even slightly important way, tell a story of you? Do the past colors of your room not stand as a part of who you were? More layers of paint make smaller rooms.
The more room the paint takes up becomes less room we allow for ourselves. Each coat and poster hides either a hole in the wall or our pasts. What’s ignored is one fact: In the end, paint chips. Some people go their entire lives hiding parts of them that, oftentimes, build who they are today. They keep painting their walls and changing from one narrative to another while others embrace their past experiences, for their good and bad. No matter what you think of your past, it has shaped you. Continuing to edit and demolish will get you nowhere but to a place where you can’t even recognize yourself. Everything catches up and every poster will grow old and when people grow curious and start noticing, that is when you’ll remember. You will remember that this is not who you are. You will understand that in your lack of acceptance of yourself, you can no longer accept any reality.
You can’t build genuine connections, nothing remotely close to it. There will always be more cracks to fix, more posters to buy. I mean, in the end, we all do this. It’s just in our nature, I guess, to deny what we think we can’t understand or don’t want to understand. But when we lack understanding of everything we’ve done and learned, how can we understand what we want? Is this just who we think we are? What about our friendships, our past, our future, our reality. Face it, you can’t control your past. But by leaving the paint and posters behind you can look forward. Stop obsessing over how you want to be portrayed. By keeping integral parts of yourself hidden, you become someone who will never resemble you – you become someone who people can never truly connect with. I’m not trying to be preachy or tell you what to do. It’s all in your hands, not mine, of what you want to do with who you are. But if you’re going to follow anything I’m going to say this is it: Whoever you are, however you want to be portrayed, let it be genuine and let it be reality.
