Is there any home that doesn’t have some sort of junk drawer? Or a coffee table with some random fuzz, a bobbin, and a nail file in it?

I don’t know when I decided I wanted a Pinterest home. Perhaps this hopeless, lost desire for the perfect home, so perfect that it feels more like a museum version of a house than an actual home, possessed us all at the same time— when Pinterest came out. But this isn’t a piece to blame social media for the destruction of our society. It’s a piece in defense of the junk drawer, and things like it.

I did not grow up in a Pinterest home, and I wonder if in the 90s there was some version of this Pinterest home that perhaps we did not have access to in our humble abode in Richmond, California, the yellow house with the three triangles we believed to symbolize the pyramids for our family of Egyptians in the US. The first couch set my parents had would live in our home for many years, a shade of brown with a thick texture to it that was as cozy as it was good at hiding stains.

The cushions all came off and it became a painfully uncomfortable sofa bed. But, the sofa bed was perfect—perfect for unfolding for a novel night of fun sleeping in the living room. Plus, the cushions, having come undone, were perfect for making forts if you added a few blankets. It was almost miraculous the way the whole space could transform into something it was not, some days a fort, other days a pirate ship. So much adventure to be had here, on the open seas or on the battlefield! And yet, somehow—poof!—it was just as easy to transform it again. The cushions went back in their place, and suddenly, my brother and I returned to the living room.

My mom wanted to have nice things. While her definition of nice may have been more humble than others, that did not prevent her from having two messy children that did not allow for that. Once, she bought a vase from a grocery store. I admit, it was actually a pretty nice vase, especially for the time, and my mom was genuinely excited about it. I remember it, and I think we have photos of it. When something knocked it over that fateful day, it may have survived, had it not fallen on the metal dumbbells below it and shattered. My mom was crushed.

We broke the glass on the corner coffee table several times. I don’t remember how. I mostly know we did this because I remember what the industrial parts of town looked like, where you can get a custom piece of glass to fit into a particular slot of a coffee table should your kids break it. Avoid glass tables when you have kids, please.

“You’re going to need kids with no limbs,” said my friend Jenny, one night in college on my couch, when I was telling her about the kind of home I wanted to have when I grew up. “They’ll be like a vase on your table.” She was joking, in her weird sense of humor, and I laughed profusely and still remember this exchange until this day—but there was something dark about this, this wanting kids that were not kids but more like glass decor to be observed and seen like the furniture itself. Where did I get this idea from?

I have written about home before, and how the roof of my perfect, Pinterest home collapsed on me some time ago when I married my husband, and what that taught me. In the rubble, I found not just how fragile my idea of a home was, but the space for a real home to emerge, one with classic imperfections, like a drawer that you can’t help but fill with junk. One where a couple can laugh and thrive, and maybe a family can come to be one day.

I have still tried, believe me, to alleviate myself of the junk drawer. There is just some stuff that, together, do not have a perfect Kondo Method category, and there is no perfect place to put them. The drawer is the on the bottom left of my kitchen and no matter how I try to put boxes in it to divide it or make it more manageable, I have recently relinquished the battle of trying to make sense of it. This is no one’s fault. There is just some stuff in life that does not neatly fit. Not everything has to make sense. In fact, accepting this, may be one of the very joys of life itself.

“Where do you like to hang out?” A friend from California, where I grew up, is currently visiting Mexico City, where I live. I paused in thought for a moment before I answered completely honestly, “my home.” In the past, perhaps I would’ve felt embarrassed about this, but in this, my life and my new reality, it is actually just the truth and it is one that makes me happy. It’s not a bad thing to have your favorite place be your home.

Most of my life, I sought to escape home, whether I was living with my parents or on my own. No matter how Pinterest-perfect my home, no matter how beautiful, no matter how cool, I always wanted to be somewhere else. it seemed like there was always something better to be doing, someplace better to be. “Destination: Far Away,” is the literal name of my travel board on my Pinterest. All my life, anywhere I was, was not where I wanted to be, except for very rare occasion. The fact that my house—no, my home—is now where I want to be on most days, feels like a miracle.

And yet, I have diverted from the Pinterest home, as detailed in my previous post. Though I will always like things clean, tidy, beautiful, and orderly as an autistic individual with taste, there are parts of it that I have given up trying to keep organized and tidy, at least on a consistent basis. Initially, this was me waving the white flag for some of the battles that unfolded in the living room with my husband—no fort to be seen, but lots of invisible ships were rocked in the form of disagreement on how to manage a home. But you know what? Now, I realize those things don’t matter. We get to choose what we make a big deal of in life, and what we ignore. Make a big deal of things that are worth it—like your love, or your joy. Ignore things that simply aren’t worth it.

While the junk drawer, that predates my husband’s presence in my home, still agitates my autism a bit, I realize now that it is an inevitable part of being a living human being—that you will need stuff and not all of life can be put perfectly into little compartments. Some of life is reckless, messy, and unruly, and it is in the midst of those unruly, messy, funny parts that a real depth of feeling can reside. And I have realized, all feelings that have depth are worth having. They add color to life. Feelings—good, bad, icky, fun, delightful, smelly, fuzzy, tender, rough, cheerful, sad—make life worth living, not things. Feelings are the delight of life.

Lately, my husband and I have been watching Malcolm in the Middle. The show for us serves two purposes—nostalgia for my husband, and a chill show to unwind with for us both since again, as an autistic individual, there are few storylines that I can tolerate paying attention to.

We were watching an episode in which Lois, the mother, couldn’t find her paycheck, so she turned the home upside down looking for it, all the while her husband, Hal, had by mistake taken it outside of the home. In looking for it, she found everything her kids and husband had ever hidden or lost in the home, from random toys to nuddie magazines, to change that seemed bound to be forever locked in the crevasses of the couch.

I forgot about change in the couch. My home has been in such pristine condition for so long, and I put all random change in the house in a jar when I find it, that I had all but forgotten that one realistic place to keep your change is indeed in the couch. Who hasn’t found change in their couch before? Isn’t this a fact of life for us all?

“My home used to be like that!” my husband said as we watched, amused with himself, as if I didn’t come from a home like that—largely brown, messy, and jumbled, very unlike the home we have now and the ones I’ve tried to have in the past. Of course I come from a home like that. Who didn’t in the 90s?

It’s probably my unrelenting fight with perfectionism, and trying to find the balance between it and that which I truly like, which overshadow the fact that I too am just a sheer human that came from a home with a junk drawer and change in the cracks of the couch. But it is true—I am indeed just a normal person, which a normal upbringing, who maybe just longed for more.

More, or a little too much—it can be hard to define the line between them. But I think the line between more and too much is in where your beautiful home becomes a burden, where your primary relationship with it becomes maintaining it, rather than using it as a place of enjoyment and pleasure, like I did before my husband taught me otherwise.

Last night, watching Malcolm in the Middle again, I got hungry and while we had cooked, healthy whole food, I longed for something different. “Have one of these,” Carlos, my husband, told me, pulling out a bag of Jin Ramen, looking not so different from the bags of Maruchan Ramen my parents used to buy from Costco when we were kids, until we got word of how bad they are for you.

Normally, I would have declined for this reason, but lately, I have been thinking about how all of life is a balancing act, and that some things are okay to enjoy in moderation. Carlos made the ramen for me as I laid on the couch petting Clara, our dog, and watching TV.

“It’s ready,” he announced, referring to my ramen but also my time machine. Transported back to the 90s in my house in Richmond—the broth looked familiar, but I was gripped more by a sense of familiar I had not experienced since in— the smell. All that was missing was the floral metal tray my mom served everything on as an Egyptian woman.

Lately, another thing I have been reflecting on our five senses, and how much we take them for granted, diluting them and barely noticing them as we busy ourselves in our minds for most of the day, rarely allowing ourselves the depth of feeling our senses are meant to give us. I recently reflected on sound. Taste is one I think I don’t think about enough. I realized this lack of appreciation for taste as I put the ramen in my mouth, and for a moment, the throw blanket from the couch that draped over my shoulders was replaced in my mind’s eye with my Pinkie Blankie, my blankie when I was a kid. An array of feelings and memories washed over me—mostly ones of so much comfort, and safety. The kind of feelings you got from being a sick kid, and your parents are home.

I am not sure if there was ever a day when I felt as safe as the days in which I was sick and home from school. I wrapped Pinkie around me, and ate top ramen from the metallic tray, the smell from the steam percolating upwards, placed on the coffee table which may or may not have been broken at the time. The brown textured couch behind me, the ghost of the broken vase surely nearby—ahh.

It’s so funny that, here I am, 39 years old, and I am just now realizing—this was the life all along! What failed to be there from a material standpoint—what failed to be beautiful in the conventional ways we define beauty now—is actually all I ever longed for, all I have ever wanted, all along. A safe home. A cozy home. A smell so familiar, and so sweet. A soft fuzzy blankie.

In chasing pre-conceived Western notions of beauty and achievement, all I ever got was something I felt the need to preserve and maintain instead of enjoy. And here, right here, at the crossroads of marriage and surrender to the Divine and His Divine plan for me, I realize—I have been here! The path has been full circle!

It’s funny. Maybe it’s just me, or maybe it is the fact that I am close to the Islamic age of maturity, but after relentless chasing and pushing forwards on most of the paths I have chosen in life, I have realized, that most paths are not a straight line, but a circle. We think we’re so clever. It’s funny that the paths worth traveling always lead home.

Traveling the road less traveled, or even trailblazing a new one, may be fun sometimes. But most likely, your roads will take you not from point A to point B in life, unless you haven’t fully arrived yet—they will take you in a perfect circle.

Most roads in life will lead you right back where you came from. You’ll find what you wanted, was exactly what you started with, but seen through a whole new light—one of gratitude for having arrived home, after a road that felt far, far too long.