Boxworld

I've been reordering my bookshelves. I do this every few weeks or so. Books are chaotic, bound and covered without any harmony of size or color, so it becomes my job to create as much harmony as I can with them. My brain demands a balance between organization by size and organization by color: there must be one without sacrificing the other. Over the years I've installed more shelves, bought books solely to facilitate these patterns, switched and re-switched books around and around. Harmony is satisfying. But it is consuming work, and it never really ends.

Patterns occupy my brain, meaning that they pitch camp, dig in their iron spikes and refuse to leave. I've had to focus on them in spite of schoolwork, grades, sleep, other people, and the ghosts that like to breakdance on the floor beside my desk. It's kind of like being trapped within a big glass box with a two-million-piece puzzle before you: to unlock the box and free yourself, you must first complete the puzzle. You must take each piece and find its harmony.

Obsessiveness is a spectrum of behavior, and I fall in the place that demands that everything be done in threes, sixes, and nines. It's like having a nagging, neverending pressure inside your chest and head that urges you to buy three more guinea pigs to complete the set of nine, to convince your significant other to change their name so that the spelling and syllables and sounds match up well with your own, to spend literally days working on a list of names and titles for a book before you can write it. And to feel lost and adrift to see no one else struggle in quite the same way as you do.

Being on medical leave from school is a break from a major source of questioning and searching and struggling, but only because I notice the box less, and face less consequences for being trapped. But the trade-off is a great deal of distance between myself and my friends.

If it weren't for the breakdancing ghosts to keep me company at two o'clock in the morning while I rearrange my books yet again, I might actually feel isolated.

#obsessions #mentalhealth