Our surroundings have an uncanny way of holding up a mirror to the psyche. When you walk into a room that breathes—where the light pours in clean and unhindered, where every surface isn’t demanding something from you—your shoulders drop. Contrast that with stepping across a threshold into visual noise: stacks of unfinished business, objects heavy with emotional freight, or simply a chaos of things that belong to a life you aren’t living anymore.
Long before Western design started talking about minimalism and sensory regulation, the ancient principles of feng shui understood this relationship between wind and water, yin and yang, and the invisible currents of chi. The premise is disarmingly simple: arrange your physical world with intention, and you cultivate an environment that offers peace, stability, and nourishment instead of friction.
Yet the quiet truth we rarely talk about is how little say most of us had in our first environments. As children, we are conscripted into someone else’s visual and emotional landscape. Today’s kids get mood boards and paint swatches of their own choosing, but growing up in the 70’s meant living inside adult design declarations. In our condo, that meant stewed-tomato shag carpeting running through the rooms like a relentless pulse. The family room with dark wood paneling; the living room held a cream velveteen sectional. The kitchen was an unrepentant blaze of harvest gold, while the dining room made a grand statement with a Peter Max mural, a string-and-lucite pendant light, and a square melamine table fitted with puzzle-piece padded chairs in discordant primary tones. My parents slept inside an autumnal woods mural, elevated on a platform around a sunken bed.
And then there was my room. I wanted a galaxy. I wanted deep, quiet space and a Star Wars mural stretching across the walls—something vast and uncluttered. Instead, I got yellow, a color I have spent a lifetime actively disliking. When I was refused jumping horses we landed on a compromise: a wallpaper called Kind Cats, filled with collages of comical cats. Down the hall in the guest room, the walls carried that ubiquitous multi-toned mod swoosh, painted to match a set of bedsheets that felt like standard-issue seventies Americana.
We don’t emerge from childhood unscathed by those textures. You spend your formative years absorbing someone else’s aesthetic nervous system, learning by default what soothes you and what grates against your skin.
My mother is an artist and interior designer, and as the decades rolled on, her style settled into neutral, transitional territory—partly accommodating my father’s taste for heavy timbers, thick fabrics, and commanding antiques. But beneath the curation, every horizontal surface remained occupied. She lived with the restless, accumulating mind where every tabletop becomes a staging area. To a child who craved clear space and order, it felt perpetually loud, chaotic, and unpeaceful.
That is how the habit of holding on begins. You keep the piles of paper because an unspoken voice insists that shredding them means erasing pieces of history. You convince yourself that the artifact is the memory
We do the same thing with photographs. Somewhere along the line, we were taught that throwing away a picture is an act of betrayal—as if tossing a glossy 4×6 into the bin erases the human being on it, or dishonors the timeline of your own life. But holding onto thick envelopes of past relationships out of pure obligation is its own kind of haunting. Sifting through an old box and seeing an ex-partner’s face over and over doesn’t tether you to truth; it just anchors you to expired chapters. You don’t need an exhaustive visual archive to prove you loved, or lived, or learned a hard lesson. It’s entirely permissible to drop the bulk of that history into the trash and keep only the rare frame where you felt genuinely radiant, or where the day itself was objectively spectacular. The rest has served its purpose. You don’t owe an old timeline your closet space.
You see the sharp end of this clinging when you work on the hospital floor. Day after day, I admit older patients who are slipping out of their prime, and their adult children sit at the bedside recounting who these people were in their heyday—the brilliant, multifaceted humans they once were. (Sometimes, of course, the candor swings the other way, and you learn they were terrible parents.) But you also learn to spot the imprint of their working minds within five minutes of casual conversation. I can pick an engineer out of a crowded room without looking at a chart. I ask, Were you an engineer?, and they look up, slightly stunned, and say, Well, yeah, Lockheed back in the day.
They have an unmistakable architecture to their thinking: methodical, precise, anchored in logic, and subtly detached. My dad had that exact mind. Even though he channeled it into advertising and public relations because he was an extrovert who lived for the spotlight, the engineering framework ran underneath everything. And that precise blend—the calculated intellect wrapped in the charismatic need to occupy the center of the room—left a deeper imprint than I care to admit. It explains, with uncomfortable clarity, certain gravity wells I’ve been pulled into over the years, including relationships where that exact dynamic felt familiar long before it proved exhausting.
Tomorrow would have been his birthday. He’s been gone since 2018, but a date on the calendar still carries a distinct resonance. It brings his presence into the room just enough to remind me of that inheritance: I absorbed his analytical, systematic edge, but I rebelled against the heavy clutter and noise of his world.
Coming into your own is largely a process of claiming the autonomy you were denied when you were small. It is the realization that you no longer have to live inside anyone else’s aesthetic, emotional, or intellectual architecture. Letting go of the boxes, the decades-old tax paperwork, the pictures of people who belong only to the past, and the people-pleasing compromises isn’t callous. It is an act of clear, quiet discernment. It is looking at an object, a photograph, or an old pattern and recognizing that while it might have built the foundation of where you started, it doesn’t belong in the room you’re designing for tomorrow. You clear the floor, strip away the ghosts, and finally let the air move through.
