On the Venn diagram where multi-letter diagnoses, neurotype, and lived experience overlap, there’s this very specific little pocket of my brain that desperately wants to move the furniture.

I don’t know what it is about it…

Maybe it’s a bit like playing dollhouse. Except now I get to play dollhouse the way I want to. The more I think about it, the more I realize that a lot of what I do with our home is exactly that. Building human-sized sets. For dolls who need good lighting and places to sit.

Wow. That makes me sound creepier than I am. Or at least makes my interior decorating choices feel creepier than intended. But that’s not actually what my brain is spinning on right now.

What I can’t stop thinking about is that if my partner weren’t asleep in this room, I would be rearranging the furniture. Not because it’s a good idea. Not because it’s the right time. But because the urge is there. Loud. Persistent. Familiar.

It sounds crazy. I know.

But solving a room configuration helps me. And not in a “thinking” way. That’s not it at all. Solving a room configuration lets me solve something when I really need a win.

Sometimes it opens up a whole new perspective. Even if the flow doesn’t work, at least I’ve done something. I touched something solid. Fluffed a pillow. Filled a vase. Tried to use something stupid as a room divider. You know the stuff.

Sometimes I get so mad I have to put it all back the way it was because in practice my brilliant idea was… deeply stupid. And I can’t contain myself and I just scream.

I remember doing this from a very young age. Moving my little chair out onto the patio. Moving things around my bedroom. I needed things to be where they needed to be, and I’d keep trying again and again until they were.

Maybe it was because we moved every few years from the time I was born.

Maybe it was a need to control my own space when everything felt like it could be uprooted at any moment.

Maybe I was preparing for the zombie apocalypse. You know. Getting good at moving big furniture on my own.

At some point I had a water bed, which severely limited my options. Looking back, I sometimes wonder if my parents were aware of that particular benefit.

When I first started doing it, the whole house was asleep. But I remember it really intensifying in my teens. So maybe it makes sense that now, as I dance around menopause, it’s taken over my waking thoughts again.

The thing is, right now, as I lie wide awake thumb typing from bed with soft snoring beside me, all I can think about is getting some time tomorrow to set up the little vanity desk that’s waiting to find just the right spot.

We’ve been in the same house for three years and I’ve known I needed a vanity. A place to sit and do vanity things. I don’t need to justify this to you.

But also I kind of will. Because that’s what I do here.

I’m getting older. I have aches and pains. Normal ones. Chronic ones. Stupid ones. Ones from leaning over the bathroom sink at a weird angle trying to get my face close enough to the mirror so I can watch as my pore scraper pops up tiny bits of whatever yuck lives in there.

Or you know. Trying to put on makeup.

I’ve always been very near sighted. But now it’s something more. I can’t wrench my neck every time I want to wax my brows or apply eyeliner.

I always have though. Always.

As a kid, I would climb up onto the bathroom counter, put my feet in the sink, and get my face as close to the mirror as I could. To see myself. To see what I was made of.

Back then it was about seeing better. Getting close enough to catch every detail.

Now I have to get that close just to see where to put a zit sticker.

What I’m starting to understand is that this urge to rearrange usually shows up when there’s something I’ve been resisting. Something I don’t actually have a choice about anymore.

Not a surrender. That word feels wrong. Too final. Too loaded.

More like an acknowledgment that surrender is sometimes a better option than defeat.

Even as I type all of this about me. My self. I can feel how charged it is. How confrontational. How judgmental.

I know I’m on the list of people in my life who haven’t always been kind to me. And I’ll fight that version of myself. Anytime. That fight has muscle memory. That fight knows how to win.

At least it used to.

That’s the part I’m trying to let go of.

But the control? That’s something I want to keep.

Control of myself. My actions. My framing.

So maybe this isn’t about moving furniture in the middle of the night.

Maybe it’s about adjusting the room to fit the body I actually have. Making space for what’s already here instead of pretending I can outthink it. Choosing arrangement over resistance, not because it’s peaceful, but because it’s possible.

Tomorrow I’ll move the desk. Or I won’t. I’ll try it one way and then another. I’ll decide and then second-guess myself and then decide again.

That’s the control I’m keeping.

Not over the world.

Not over what’s changing.

Just over how I meet it.