From early childhood, I felt compelled to count things. I counted every word in the word lists on the endpaper pages of my copy of Dr. Seuss’s Hop on Pop (the original copy of which I still own). I counted every colored dot on the endpaper pages of Put Me in the Zoo (Robert Lopshire) from my “Beginner Books • I Can Read It All By Myself” collection. If I lost count, I had to go back to the beginning and start again. I did this every one of the hundreds of times I read those books.

I counted steps as I walked from Point A to Point B. If I lost count, I would go back to the beginning and start over. If something prevented me from the redo, I created some sort of substitute mental device so that losing count didn’t bring me bad luck.

I avoided stepping on cracks in sidewalks well into adulthood. “Don’t step on the crack or you’ll break your mother’s back” was a lighthearted game with my childhood friends, but I actually felt I would jinx the world if I stepped on a crack. On the rare times that I did, I concocted a corrective step that would erase the error, like going back and starting again.

I thought everyone “had a thing about numbers” like I did. To my mental health detriment, growing up in a western society meant that I needed to have everything in even numbers, and to have things be symmetrical. I was driven to distraction when there was not an even, balanced set of objects.

I was surprised to find out from conversations with friends that not everyone’s life is dictated by imposing a number system on everything. I did not realize how restricted my mentality was until I moved to an entirely different cultural environment.

Having grown up in the United States, many aspects of design and aesthetics stemmed from European traditions. Think of historic gardens of France and England. They are usually arranged in some sort of symmetrical form, with easily identifiable patterns. There are measurable starts and endings to forms and shapes.

My life changed remarkably when I moved to Japan upon graduating from college. My mental system of counting and making sure there was an even, symmetrical set of objects or actions was tossed upside down and backwards.

In Japan, odd numbers take precedence, and asymmetricity is a primary design element. Buy a set of teacups and saucers as a wedding gift in the U.S. and you will have options for a set of four, six, or eight. Buy a set of teacups in Japan, and you will have five cups.

Visit a Japanese temple garden and you will experience the artful manipulation of nature, skillfully rounding corners, having odd sets of asymmetrical forms that appear as if nature had placed them that way. Is a bonsai tree symmetrical? It is not. It is cleverly designed to have branches of different sizes twisting in different directions, while creating a sense of balance overall within the asymmetricity. It is an enhanced manifestation of natural forms.

Living in Japan where my entire “even and symmetrical” control system had to be thrown by the wayside lightened a huge mental burden. This does not mean I overcame my compulsion to count and impose order on things, but my preference switched to odd numbers (especially prime numbers… there’s nothing better than a good prime number!), and I embraced things in asymmetric form. My need to impose numerical structures was still there, but odd numbers and asymmetric forms are much more forgiving than a system requiring even numbers in symmetrical form.

What does this look like in a living space? Though I was never diagnosed, many would say these traits sound like characteristics of OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder). In my case, it does not mean that every speck of dust is wiped away or that everything is clean and disinfected. It means that of the estimated two thousand books in my house, at one point, I could find any given book on a certain shelf level of a specific bookshelf. Books were variously organized by size, by type, by who gave them to me, or some combination thereof. I had multi-faceted organizational systems not only for books, but also for my extensive collection of music and movies, going back to the old days with cassette tapes and CDs for music, and VHS tapes and DVDs for movies.

In the years before I had kids, I enjoyed doing jigsaw puzzles as a sporadic treat, typically done in a frenzy on a Christmas or New Years Day, my rare quiet days. Organizing shapes and colors was entertaining but also a way to scratch that itch in my brain that needed to put things where they belong. God forbid that a puzzle piece ever went missing. One puzzle piece was lost for two years, and it bothered me every single day until it appeared in a clump of dust under a piece of furniture.

My husband once admitted to me that when I was upset about something like a missing puzzle piece and he reassured me by saying, “Don’t worry, we’ll definitely find it,” he actually had no do-or-die intention of finding it. His trick that was supposed to calm me never worked again.

Fast forward to my mid-thirties when I was mom to two young sons. Having one baby is enough to throw anyone’s baby-free life routine out with the bath water. Having a second baby really throws the normal sense of order into a tizzy. I no longer had the wherewithal to keep things in the same precise order as before, and the house started filling up with all sorts of baby clothes, toys and play equipment.

Breathlessly (and sleeplessly) guiding my boys along the escalator of infancy, preschool and beyond—with the huge additional emotional, time, and resource drain of an autism diagnosis for my younger son—meant that our once well-organized house swiftly started taking on hoarder house qualities. There was no time to sort and discard enough objects to stem the tide of incoming items as the boys grew.

Despite the clutter buildup, I could still find pretty much any book or music CD by instinct. As my sons got older, they started moving objects around, and I had to keep more of an eye out to maintain my sense of which books were where.

Our younger son’s autism diagnosis was revealed in stages as we recognized differences from typically developing children. He wasn’t talking understandably by age three, didn’t look people in the eye, and didn’t use typical gestures to communicate with people. These were the things that he had difficulty doing.

On the flip side, he had a driving motivation to move objects in his environment, including all the items I used to keep relatively organized. When he was still crawling and cruising along the furniture to get from place to place, I noticed that my hairbands from the bathroom drawer kept disappearing. It took us weeks to discover that our not-yet walking one-year-old was deftly transferring hairbands from a drawer to an entirely different room, into an antique Japanese tea cabinet. We were baffled yet impressed by his motivation and ability.

As he got older, this tendency became more powerful and sometimes became a source of meltdowns and frustration when he couldn’t get the objects in his world to be the way he imagined them in his mind. With the abundance of bookshelves in our small house, books became easy target objects for him to manipulate so he could assert some control over his world. Unlike me, he was later officially diagnosed as having OCD.

Over time, my unofficial yet established system of book organization was dismantled. What was worse, my son decided that books should not always be lined up side-by-side, but instead be jammed into the shelf in layers in an overlapping V-pattern with bindings as the back center line. Even worse, some of the books were jammed over each other with the binding bent backwards, interior of the book facing outwards, binding sometimes damaged, and pages sometimes squished or torn. Sigh.