Boxes of Chaos: Why You Need a Designated Place For Mess

It's cosmic

Artwork by Dorian Legret; find him at @dorianlegret

I was well into my 30s before I noticed a trend in my life: In every single room, there is some kind of black box of chaos. Sometimes the box is literally a black, felt box and contains all the things I don’t know what to do with, can’t throw away, and am certain I will find a use for later. Sometimes it’s a drawer. Sometimes it’s a bag (that probably also contains many other bags within it—fractals of bags within bags within bags). Whatever shape it takes, it seems as though every room requires a space for chaos to exist.

I have two black boxes in our bedroom right now. When I peer into them, I see foreign currency that I don’t want to get rid of but don’t know where to put… loose batteries… old notes, and one old journal. I see some plastic pieces of a toy, and I don’t know if we own it anymore. A book of matches from this restaurant we loved. Hair ties. A stray earring. A stack of blurry pictures of seals I took with my waterproof disposable camera when I was a camp counselor on Catalina Island in my 20s. All of this shit that could be thrown away but does have a place… somewhere.

It goes without saying that I never want to deal with these boxes.  

One of my fave writers on Substack,

Cody Cook-Parrott

, recently wrote about her “crazy room.” She has three rooms in her home, and one of them is called the crazy room because it contains “…all of my personal belongings, is my closet, my office, has a twin bed, my dresser, all my journals, cameras, photographs, love notes, sex toys, printer paper, printer, binders, my desk, 12 step literature, yarn, and chords to things I no longer own. It now also has multiple binders, file folders, file boxes, sticky notes, jars with markers and everything I need for grad school.” Instead of a box of chaos, it is a room of chaos, which allows the other rooms in her house to be, as she puts it, “neutral.”

Maybe you’ve heard of the DOOM method, which has a more drastic ring to it but means only “Didn’t organize, only moved.” The black boxes (or rooms) of chaos allow for things to be moved, not organized.

Dealing with these boxes results in more chaos. It’s unironically called the chaos method, where you pull absolutely everything from the box/drawer/bag/room into a visible mess and then organize it. That requires the organization step, though, which I might argue is the sole purpose of having a box of chaos or a crazy room—the ability to avoid organizing.

Chaos didn’t always need organizing. The word “chaos” (χάος) in ancient Greek originally referred to a “gaping void” or “chasm.” In Greek mythology, Chaos was considered the first primordial state of existence, a void or an abyss from which the first gods emerged. It was described as a formless, empty space or a dark, yawning abyss that existed before the ordered cosmos came into being. It wasn’t until the Medieval and Renaissance folks started using the word to encompass the void and any state of disorder, confusion, or unstructured existence that the word shifted to mean “mess.”

So maybe the black box of chaos is actually a fertile void from which cosmic beings will soon spring forth.

Or maybe the black box of chaos is less of a problem to solve and more of a shrine to the messiness of life. A sacred little reliquary of the things we don’t know what to do with yet—the objects, emotions, and memories that resist categorization or resolution. Perhaps the value in the junk drawer isn’t in its contents but in its existence, a reminder that not everything in life can or should be neatly filed away.

So the next time you glance at your own box/drawer/room/garage of chaos, maybe don’t see it as a failure of organization. See it as a little altar to the unknown, to the creative, to the not-yet. Let it remind you that some things take time to make sense—or maybe they never will, and that’s okay too. After all, even the cosmos started in chaos.

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