The Weight of Chaos
This is a restructured essay from my last post that I ran through ChatGPT. I really liked how it came out but felt very conflicted about sharing it because I used AI. I'd be curious about what people think about using AI in this way.
For me, it had a very cathartic feeling and made me feel... seen. It made me feel like all the chaotic and unorganized thoughts in my head got laid out on a table and put in place for the first time in a long time. It brought me some peace.
Anyways, here it is...
might take down later
I’m writing this from my parents’ garage office — surrounded by clutter, tools, receipts, and junk I don’t remember arriving but somehow can't get rid of. The fridge inside the house has been empty for weeks, aside from condiments and expired yogurt. Everyone here has ADHD, including me. And the house shows it. Nothing is where it’s supposed to be. Everything is half-done.
I love clean, calm spaces. I dream of them. But I don’t know how to keep one. Not for myself. Not for anyone. Every time I’ve found safety — real, bodily, I-can-breathe-here safety — I’ve found a way to muddy it. That’s the word I keep coming back to: muddying. Like I step into a space, and the warmth seeps out. The light goes cold. The ease disappears.
And for a long time, I believed that was my fault.
I remember the first time I felt a home feel... safe. Not my childhood home. Someone else’s. I was dating someone in university, and the first night I stayed at her place, I didn’t want to leave. Not just because of her — though I loved her — but because of the space. Her bedroom was small, simple, clean. Soft light. Calming air. I could sleep. I felt, maybe for the first time in my life, that I didn’t have to keep watch. That night I made a quiet promise to myself — probably unconscious at the time — to stay there as often as I could.
It felt like safety.
And I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.
But whenever I try to recreate it, I feel like I ruin it. I mess it up. I clutter the room, or leave dishes in the sink, or let the laundry pile up. The warmth disappears — and I convince myself it’s because of me. I dirty the energy. The house loses its soul. And then I leave, and the person I’m with puts it all back together again. Restores the calm. And that stings — because it confirms what I already suspect: I can’t be trusted with nice things. Or worse — I’m the reason nice things go away.
That belief didn’t come out of nowhere.
When I was around eleven or twelve, I walked into my parents’ bedroom and found my mom crying. She didn’t cry much. I asked her what was wrong, and through her tears, she said, “Your dad lost all our fucking money.”
I didn’t fully understand what that meant, but I knew it wasn’t good. I knew it meant something big had broken — and that something scary was coming next.
That was 2008. My parents were in construction and real estate, and they had borrowed a lot of money to try and buy a company. It was a leveraged buyout — basically using debt to buy a business — and when the financial crisis hit, the bank called their loans. Business loans in Canada, I later learned, are often structured as “on demand.” That means the bank can ask for their money back any time — no notice, no cushion. And in 2008, they did.
After that, the creditors came. Lawsuits started. Assets were seized. And suddenly I was a kid with a new job: protect the house. Don’t open the door to strangers. Don’t tell anyone your name. Don’t say who lives here. Watch, listen, stay alert.
At the same time, our lifestyle didn’t really change. Not on the surface. We still lived in the big house. Still went on vacations. Still hosted parties. It was confusing — because everything looked fine, but underneath, nothing felt safe.
That’s when I picked up some core beliefs I’m still trying to unlearn.
• Things are temporary.
• Don’t get attached — you’ll lose them anyway.
• Gifts are just transactions in disguise.
• You don’t belong anywhere, so don’t overstay.
And this one, most of all:
• You can’t take care of things — because you are the thing that breaks them.
These beliefs don’t serve me. But they’ve been with me for so long, they feel like truth. And they show up everywhere — in my living spaces, my relationships, my inability to start or finish simple tasks.
The irony is: I love clean and cozy spaces. I crave them. But when it’s time to maintain them, something in me rebels. Cleaning feels exhausting. Like a waste of energy I might need for some future emergency. I think, “Why bother? It’ll just get messy again.” Or, “You don’t deserve a nice space. You’re just going to ruin it.”
And yet, every time I do clean — something in me lifts. I get energy back. My thoughts settle. My body relaxes. So I know the voice telling me it’s pointless is lying. But that doesn’t stop it from being loud.
Right now, there are a hundred things that need doing around this property. Laundry. Dishes. Vacuuming. Cleaning out the melted freezer in the garage from last year’s power outage. Organizing the barn. Fixing the gazebo roof. Rebuilding the front driveway bridge. Setting up rain barrels. Going through my grandpa’s storage. The list goes on.
But none of it is really about chores.
It’s about agency. Safety. Legacy. Trying to prove — to myself, to my parents, to some invisible jury — that I can hold something together. That I can stay.
Because honestly, I don’t know if my parents can. I suspect they need to sell this place. They won’t talk about it. Maybe they can’t. I don’t push too hard, because I know what it’s like to feel like your whole world might fall apart if someone asks the wrong question.
And I feel this pressure to save them. But I don’t know how. I don’t even know what I’d be saving them from. Is this just my imagination? Am I projecting? Is everyone actually fine?
They say they are. Most of the time, they seem fine. But something underneath feels... off. Like we’re all living on borrowed time.
I feel stuck between two lives — the one where I stay and help, and the one where I go and build something of my own. But even that assumes I know how to build anything. That I know how to start. That I can untangle my life from theirs long enough to find out.
There’s guilt, too. Deep guilt. For all the money they’ve spent on me — on school, therapy, treatments, a failed concrete company they handed to me as some kind of MBA-by-fire. And I fumbled it. I cracked under pressure. I overspent. I didn’t show up. I failed.
And still, they didn’t give up on me.
How do you pay that back?
I don’t know. I’m 29 and still figuring out how to do my own taxes. I don’t own any real assets. I’m not good at working for other people. And I’ve been a financial dependent for so long that I don’t even know where I end and their support begins.
But I want to learn. I want to earn a life I can be proud of. I want to stop muddying the spaces I live in. I want to clean the fridge. Fix the gazebo. Organize the barn. Not just for them — but for me.
Because maybe I can build something. Maybe I can stay.
And maybe, just maybe, it won’t fall apart this time.