My room is a sedimentary rock. The surrounding high-paced, high-stress environment provides the pressure necessary to compress each day into a new layer of clothing: Monday’s T-shirt lies beneath Tuesday’s fuzzy socks, Wednesday’s jeans, Thursday’s oversized sweater, and Friday’s sun dress. Scattered beside the fashion time-capsule are colorful scraps of construction paper from Saturday’s Spanish project, and a heap of Sunday’s freshly washed laundry. My room is an archeological site, full of age-old fossils, damp towels, power cords, and, somewhere, a desk.

It is a specially designed obstacle course; only I know where to step to avoid serious injury. My mind has devised a detailed map, marking the safest routes to my bed and drawers. Drawn in red are the high-danger zones of my open laptop, my half-completed poster board, and my softball bat, allowing me to gingerly avoid a broken keyboard or a twisted ankle. My room is a booby trap for an unknowing invader, a personalized alarm for a clumsy intruder, and a hideaway from organized society.

Every weekend, I begin to clean. I relive the week’s clothing, mail, projects, and homework, belting alongside my hodgepodge of music and dancing clumsily around my room. In the last 168 hours I have accrued so much dirty laundry that my new laundry basket cracks, accumulated so much trash that both of my modestly-sized garbage cans overflow. My dresser has raised the world’s strongest army of half-empty tea mugs, who have begun to ponder the ethics of herbal warfare. My hairbrushes have convened in a corner to spread the latest gossip, and an assembly of candy wrappers have gone on hunger strike. It’s an hour-long, exhilarating adventure with a twist ending: rediscovering the color of my Ikea-brand carpet. 

In walking past my room each day, my parents’ reactions have slowly evolved from perturbed to apathetic. At first, they would grimace, shutting the door tightly to block out the unwanted mess: a secret blemish on an otherwise eminently tidy household. They’d pressure me to clean the “foul and fetid environment,” claiming they could sense the uncontrolled chaos escaping from the crack beneath my door. They’d devise horror stories of my impending doom, hypothesizing that my room was in fact a ravenous monster, bound to swallow me whole. But as the years have passed, they have grown progressively complacent. Now they just laugh, making the occasional joke as they wonder to themselves how I live like this, how it is possible that the mess doesn’t bother me.

Truly, it doesn’t. Every day I challenge myself to augment my knowledge, heighten my academic performance, and increase my prowess as an athlete. I pressure myself to achieve perfection in the classroom, perfection on the softball diamond, and perfection on the recital stage. But in my room, this pressure is off. I don’t have to be perfect. Among the chaos and clutter, I am comfortable, content. Free from the stress of maintaining a certain standard of excellence, I am able to take a breath. Unhindered by the unrelenting burden of self-motivation and the unwavering desire for utmost achievement, I am finally able to relax.

And so, I don’t just let the mess live: I crave it. I embrace it. In at least one facet of my life, I welcomeimperfection. But the door to my room remains permanently shut.