Growing up, my father always told me that you can tell a lot about a person by the state of their bedroom. This is not a sentiment that I ever particularly understood, I believed that if someone wanted their room to be messy then that was completely up to them. I thought this because I am that person. I’ve never been sure as to why, but I’ve always kept my room in some state of disarray. My room is small, no larger than a standard office. It is covered by large piles of clothes that I don’t see the point in hanging up and water bottles that never seem to make it to the trash can. My friends always refer to my bed as a ‘storage unit’ because half of is is covered with clothes and leaves only a small side for me to sleep on. For most of my life, I didn’t see a problem with this. My room is my sanctuary, the place I go to feel safe. Nothing compares to the feeling of coming home from a long day and relaxing in my room. Recently, I’ve realized that my room is my escape, but also my prison.

A constant battle rages in my house due to my inability to clean my room and my dad’s insistence that I do. He always assumed that the reason I don’t listen to him is because I don’t respect him, but that is not the case. I would stare at the chaos that was my room and desperately want fix it, but fail every time to move or act at all. The frustration I felt was intense, I knew there was a problem but I didn’t know how to put it into words, so I kept it to myself. For years I avoided all of my problems and never asked what it was I was feeling or ask for help in any way. I didn’t know it at the time, but what I was experiencing was depression. Depression that was caused by an inability to cope with any of my anxiety in a healthy way. My coping mechanism was to shut down completely. Closing my bedroom door was closing off myself from the world in my own little safe place where conflict didn’t exist.

It was not until very recently that I finally understood my problem and began to take steps to help myself. After a very long, arduous fight with my dad, we sat down and had possibly one of the most surreal conversations of my entire life. He said “Real life is painful for you. The anxiety that you feel for the most mundane of situations becomes so intense for you that you shut down. To get up and clean your room means facing your problems, so you don’t do it.” In three simple sentences, my father described a feeling that I have lived my entire life with but never knew how to describe in words. I realized that if I don’t live my life and deal with my problems as they come, then my life will live me. Being happy, truly happy, is something I have not felt in a long time. In that one conversation, I felt pure joy at the thought that someone understood what I was going through and was going to help me. He ended the conversation on a positive note: “I’m not saying everything will be okay, but it can be.” Just having the knowledge now that there are people who are willing to be there for me and care for me has made me believe his statement.