Day 295: Cluttered Space, Cluttered Mind

Ah yes, the brain fog and lack of energy that I experienced when I stayed here is back again. I don’t know the cause (insofar as we can actually know the causes for things like this when conjuring clever narratives and stories), but that doesn’t seem to matter as much as identifying that there is something going on.

It’s like feeling ill every time I eat a banana. I might not know why that’s happening, but the pattern is enough to help me figure out that maybe I should stay away from bananas.

Given that I feel a significant drop in motivation and well-being when I’m staying at home, the straightforward decision would be to not stay here. Stop eating bananas, dummy.

I wouldn’t care so much if I had to give up bananas forever, but going somewhere else feels like I’d be running away from something. There’s a part of me that wants to fix this so that I’d feel just as comfortable and at ease here as I did in Oregon or Santa Cruz or New York or basically anywhere else. I typically have an easy time adjusting to new scenarios and environments, but being back at my childhood home is the exception.

Here’s where the guessing and storytelling comes in.

I previously thought that my struggles with being in this house had to do with my lack of in-person social interaction with people who are not my family, and while that might be a factor, I’m starting to think that there’s a much bigger reason: feeling a lack of autonomy.

Take the room I’m staying in. It’s cramped with dressers containing my parents’ clothes; there are random items strewn about like an old fax machine that no one has touched in like a decade; basically, there’s stuff everywhere. If this were my place, I’d throw most of this stuff away and clear out space so that this room feels like a place I’d call my own. Unfortunately, my grandpa is a bit of a hoarder (this picture of one of our bathrooms should tell you as much), and I know that he’d oppose me throwing away anything away. Hell, there have been times when I’ve thrown away my own stuff and found them somehow teleported back inside the house — my grandpa had apparently gone through the rubbish and picked it out despite having no use for it. Anyone’s trash is his treasure.

Not having enough space to put my belongings means that the room becomes more cluttered than it already is, and spending all my time here results in low-grade discomfort and unpleasantness. It definitely doesn’t help that I have minimalist tendencies where I prefer to own as few things as possible.

Looking around my room now, there’s such a stark contrast to the room that I had in Oregon. There, the space was wide open and it felt like it gave my mind space to breathe and freely focus on things I care about. Here, I feel almost suffocated by the chaos around me.

So what can I do?

I can try to clean up the space, but I’m not sure how much of a difference I can make. It’s not like I can freely throw away or donate the stuff because most of it’s not mine. I feel like my grandpa have a heart attack if he saw me try to get rid of a dresser or one of the ten thousand Bibles lying around.

I can leave. I mean, I’m only planning to be here until my Taiwan visa situation gets sorted out (it’s been a doozy but that’s a topic for another post), which I’m hoping will be in the next few weeks. So I can rent a room nearby or even travel somewhere else entirely.

But given that I don’t know how long I’ll stay in Taiwan once I’m there, it makes me a bit sad that I can’t even spend significant time at home with my family. But is it worth it if I feel consistently worse here?

It’s only been two days here, and I already want to leave. How unfortunate. Or is it? Maybe I should just accept the fact that there isn’t a space for me here and that I can still spend time with my grandpa and my parents without having to stay over.

Or maybe my discomfort has very little to do with the space + lack of control over my environment and there’s another underlying cause that I’m just not aware of. I’ve found that it’s impossible to know these things in real-time so the best approach is to stay aware of the fact that stories are ultimately just stories, no matter how compelling they seem.