Friday, August 29th, 2008

Me, my bedroom and I

What your personal space says about your personality

By Joe Hunt

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

Lesley Latham’s bedroom is meticulously organized. Each corner reflects a different area of her life, be it love, prosperity or health. To most people, a green bedspread is no different than a blue one, unless they have an aesthetic preference. But Latham, Republic sophomore, is convinced her green and blue bedspread is making her sick.

Latham practices Feng Shui, the ancient Chinese art of arranging objects to create harmony in an environment. She has arranged her room into nine distinct squares, and each square only contains items and colors that are appropriate to it. An exception is the green and blue bedspread, which sits in the health square of her room. According to Feng Shui principles, blue is not a good color for health, and Latham plans to change the bedspread as soon as she can afford it. Until she does, she can plan on being sick. “My bedroom directly affects my life,” she explains as she sips on some hot tea to help with her cold.

However, you don’t need to subscribe to the idea of Feng Shui to see a correlation between yourself and your bedroom. Whether you have dedicated a corner of your room to relationships, you can’t leave the house without making your bed or you organize your clothes in piles on the floor, your space can say something about you.

One of Latham’s first projects began about six months ago when she decided to beef up the relationship corner of her room. One month after outfitting it with red colors and flowers, Latham began to start casually dating for the first time since high school. “I called my mom, and asked ‘Mom, what are three things I never do?’” Drugs, drinking and dating, her mother replied. “Well, I’m doing one of those things,” she said. The response from her mother? “What? You’re drinking?”

Although Latham and her roommate both practice Feng Shui, only three KU students list it as an interest on Facebook. In fact, the majority of students can be lumped into two different categories: those who are messy and those who are clean. There is some wiggle room between the two – not all students will be entirely messy or entirely clean – but those with bedrooms that tend toward one extreme admit that their room does reflect their personality.

Brad Dillard, Wichita senior, describes himself as a laidback, carefree person. A quick look into his room will confirm that. The room is dimly lit, and the floor is littered with clothes, both clean and dirty. He says he can tell what’s clean and what isn’t, though to the untrained eye it might be difficult. A couple dirty plates sit atop the television. Dillard will take them upstairs to the kitchen sooner or later, but he’s in no rush. “I’m far from uptight,” he explains.

This doesn’t mean Dillard is irresponsible or unsanitary, though. His room hasn’t been thoroughly tidied up in a while, but it doesn’t give off any offensive odors. “I’m not a slobby asshole or anything,” Dillard says.

On the opposite side of the spectrum is Erin Inciardi, Leawood sophomore. Although living in Chi Omega sorority with three roommates has made it more difficult for her to keep clean than when she was in high school, Inciardi is still incredibly organized.

“I get stressed out when things are messy,” Inciardi says. For that reason, she spends about 20 to 30 minutes a day putting things away or organizing her room. Drawers, desktops and laundry all must be neatly arranged before she can relax. “Sometimes I can’t sleep until I make sure everything is tidied up,” she explains. Indeed, every night before bed, she puts her books into her backpack to get ready for the next day.

Laura Leist, certified professional organizer and author of Eliminate Chaos, a book about how to get organized, says everybody has different ways of doing it. For instance, Leist explains that some people just aren’t good at putting things away in drawers and out-of-sight places. Visual organizers can forget where something is if it’s not out in plain sight, while others like Inciardi prefer everything to be tucked away neatly. That could explain why Dillard and other students like Brian Cordes, Leavenworth sophomore, don’t put their clothes in drawers.

“I seem to forget about things in drawers and find them again months later,” Cordes says. Instead, he just piles things up on his floor and on top of his desk. This leaves his room quite a mess, but as long as the clothes and other junk stay on his side of the room, he says his roommate doesn’t seem to mind.

Unfortunately for his roommate, Cordes would probably be messy even if he did use all his drawers. He admits to keeping six pairs of shoes in the room, even though he wears the same ones every day. He hasn’t worn one pair in four years.

Leist says that it is common for people to have trouble parting with items that could still be potentially useful. “Some people want to keep control of all their things, even if they don’t need them, because some other area of their life is out of control,” Leist says.

While Cordes doesn’t seem to have an emotional attachment to anything in his room save his television, he does say that his parents gave up policing the cleanliness of his room when he was about 12 years old. He hasn’t seen the floor since.

Inciardi’s household is a little different in that respect. She has always kept her room clean, but her mother, Pam, takes it an extra step by cleaning out drawers and closets a few times a year and donating any unused items to Goodwill. You could say Inciardi inherited her tidiness from her mother, but her mother says Inciardi’s vigilance even surprises her sometimes.

“We were going out to dinner for my birthday last year, and it was the end of the semester, so Erin had just moved all her stuff from school back to her bedroom,” Pam remembers. “We had reservations and took two cars to the restaurant. Erin and her sister were supposed to meet us there. They were late because she couldn’t stand to leave her room a mess.”

Inciardi remembers that night and laughs, though she says she felt a bit more like crying at the time. Even though her neatness can cause her some stress when she least needs it, she thinks it helps her get better grades. She takes all her notes with different colored pens, and intricately highlights handouts and study guides. Daily to-do lists keep her on top of all her assignments.

Cordes says his personality is much like his room: scattered. “If I tell a story, I can’t stay on the same path; I go in different directions,” he says. “I can be holding my phone and not know where it is.” This leaves him scrambling when it comes time to do schoolwork, and he spends more time looking for things than he does actually studying. Despite this, he doesn’t write his assignments down. “I’ve got a good memory,” he says.

Though Cordes’ haphazard approach to organization may be troublesome when he can’t find things, some experts think being messy can actually boost productivity and efficiency. The book A Perfect Mess by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman says the ability to improvise and deal with random and inevitable changes to plans and routines is an important skill. When such things come up in life, a messy person may be better equipped to improvise a solution, and they could save a lot of time by not organizing things every day.

Leist would argue that Inciardi’s more structured approach to organization is more efficient and effective than cleaning sporadically or not at all. “It’s a lifestyle that you choose, and if there are defined places for things, you want to always have those places be kept constant,” Leist says. “It’s kind of like a fitness routine. Let’s say you go on a diet and lose a bunch of weight. In order to maintain that weight loss, you need to work at it a little bit each day.”

Every method of organization has its pros and cons, and everyone is different, so it only stands to reason that everyone will have different ways of arranging their things and their bedrooms.

What does your room say about you?

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