I am innately a disorganized person. Physically.

Living at my parents’ house as a teenager was not a pleasant experience. Despite having lived ina place where my parents were neat and relatively organized (as much as Asians can be), I just wasn’t. Putting things back where they belonged was a concept.

However, by the time I had roommates…my own messy tendencies got out of control. Although to some it was hilarious. You could enter the quad where I lived in the dorms…see my roommates’ space and you see my space. My space surrounding my bed and desk was completely chaotic. Yet I was always respectful of others, so you could distinctly see a border around my mess and my roommates.

The same applied in graduate school. My room was chaos. However, the kitchen…the bathroom. Certainly not mine. And even now.

But the point is, computers have helped me. Phone numbers? I love that there is one place on my computer for it. Email? Easy to have them pile up and quickly sort by a search term. Tracking, money transactions, credit card bills, library due dates…all digital.

Everything is happening digitally. They take away any tendency to be messy and make it automatic. I never lose anything.

But in the real world…I still have this super-anxious side. Yet my messy side doesn’t know how to communicate with this super-anxious side. So it continues to be messy, but when I do lose something, panic. Oh utter panic. I can’t focus on any conversation. The world closes.

I just need to…find…IT!

I remember my passport drama. I remember thinking how nice it would be if everything had a tracking device. Or better yet, why not make everything digital so that everything would live in the cloud. And the concept of losing meant that someone else was at fault (a data server perhaps) and not you.

If only.

But if that were the case then I wouldn’t be able to own anything. Yet would I trade ownership for having a lifetime of not losing anything? Probably not.