Selling Survival: The Aesthetics of Refusal and the Cost of Coherence

By Dick Gariepy | Big Thinky Ouchey

When the world refused to witness my pain, I made walls that could not look away.

They say to make your space your own. They don’t mention what it does to you when that space, the only place that held your disintegrating self together,gets listed for sale like it’s just another piece of inventory.

This isn’t a story about home ownership. It’s a story about surviving the quiet violence of epistemic erasure. About watching your last claim to agency,the walls you chose, the mess you transformed into coherence,get scheduled for appraisal. It’s about knowing that the same people who mocked your grief will now quietly scoff at your taste, calculating resale value as they tour the aftermath of your breakdown.

I didn’t decorate to impress. I didn’t paint with resale in mind. I painted the ceiling silver because nothing else in my life would absorb what I was saying. Because my voice disappeared into the same administrative black hole that devoured my medical records, my appeals, my credibility. Every nail I hammered into drywall screamed louder than any letter I wrote. Every clash of fabric and light fixture, every aesthetic decision that would make a realtor wince, was a declaration: I’m still here. I still get to choose something. And now, I have three months to liquidate the only room that ever believed me.

There’s no backup plan. No therapist on speed dial. No benevolent system waiting to catch me. Just exhaustion, shame, and the surreal task of turning a trauma shelter into a sellable asset. I can barely look at this place now,this lifeboat I built while drowning,knowing it’s about to be picked apart by strangers who’ll call it a “fixer-upper with potential.” It deserves a eulogy, not a walkthrough.

So that’s what this is. A love letter to the room that listened when no one else did. A philosophical autopsy on what it means to survive long enough to lose even your coping mechanisms. A meditation on justice, madness, and the brutal absurdity of staging your psychiatric fallout like it’s an Instagram-ready listing.

Let’s begin.

Epistemic Injury, or Why the Walls Had to Change

There’s a kind of violence that leaves no bruise. It doesn’t break skin or shatter bone,it corrodes your credibility. It whispers that your memories are suspect, your voice unreliable, your experience inadmissible in the court of reason.

Philosopher Miranda Fricker calls it epistemic injustice: the systematic denial of someone’s standing as a knower. It’s not loud. It’s not cinematic. It’s a slow, administrative dismembering of your reality. You say what happened, and someone tilts their head, notes your tone, and asks if you’ve tried yoga. You describe harm, and they glance at your chart, remind you of your diagnosis, and gently suggest your perception may be “distorted.”

Eventually, you start revising yourself in real time. You swap “definitely” for “maybe,” “I know” for “I think.” You become your own censor, parsing which truths are small enough to survive being doubted.

This is how you break someone professionally. No shouting, no slander,just the polite transformation of protest into pathology. “Patient reports distress.” “Displays maladaptive rumination.” “Appears non-compliant.” Your clarity becomes confusion. Your grief becomes a symptom. Your refusal becomes a risk factor.

That’s not care. That’s narrative control.

This happened to me. Not once, not in one dramatic blowout, but repeatedly,by doctors, case workers, university officials wielding “policy” like a scalpel and “we’re concerned” like a sedative. Every attempt to speak plainly was metabolized into something less urgent, more digestible. My words didn’t vanish,they were reprocessed. Turned into documentation. Sanitized. Filed.

I didn’t feel angry at first. I felt unreal. Like I was watching myself on a delay, flickering around the edges. When no one affirms your reality, it begins to loosen. The ground feels optional. Your name sounds approximate. You try to narrate your life and realize no one’s listening,no one even believes there’s a plot.

That’s when I started painting.

Not because I wanted to “express myself.” Not as therapy. I painted because I was drowning in disbelief, and I needed something to hold. The world wouldn’t register me, but a wall would. A wall would stay purple if I made it purple. It wouldn’t counter-interpret. It wouldn’t suggest breathing exercises. It wouldn’t fold my scream into a case note.

If the institutions erased me, then the room would have to remember. If I couldn’t be legible to others, I could at least become visible to myself. One absurd choice at a time,paint the ceiling silver,paint a mural there, paint the bathtub and coat it in epoxy resin. .

I didn’t change the walls to be seen. I changed them because I had no witnesses left. The paint listened. The light fixture stayed where I put it. The room didn’t ask for a second opinion. And that made it safer than any clinician I’ve ever known.

Home Sweet Home

A Chair Is Not Just a Chair

There’s a myth about people who obsess over their space,who rearrange furniture at 2 a.m., repaint the same wall three times in a month, or suddenly decide one dining chair must be reupholstered in crushed velvet. The myth says we’re doing it for aesthetics. As if it’s about beauty. As if we’re just nesting.

What I was doing wasn’t nesting. It was triage.

When your mind begins to unspool, you reach for what won’t lie to you. Not the past. Not the institutions. Not your symptoms. You reach for a lamp. A shelf. A six-inch shift in a bookcase that restores the illusion of order. You begin thinking in gradients, angles, textures,because that’s the only language left that won’t betray you. The chair doesn’t gaslight you. The chair doesn’t ask for clarification. The chair moves when you move it. It responds.

Psychologists call it environmental mastery,the need to shape your surroundings to feel real, intact, in control. It’s not a quirk. It’s a survival mechanism. When the outside world becomes hostile or unresponsive, the psyche narrows its focus to what it can influence. If you can’t change your situation, you change the room. And if you can’t change the room, you change the objects inside it until something, anything, yields.

So yes, I rearranged the furniture in the middle of the night. I moved plants. I rotated rugs. I stacked books by hue instead of theme. Not because I had time to kill. Not because I cared about ambiance. Because I needed to confirm I still existed. Because I needed to touch something that acknowledged me back.

They might call that maladaptive coping. But maladaptive compared to what? Compared to pleading with a caseworker who hasn’t opened your file? Compared to waiting three months for a mental health intake while you tread water in your own collapse? Compared to stitching together your sanity with pamphlets and voicemail menus?

No. This wasn’t maladaptive. This was precision survival in a world that kept disappearing me.

The truth is, I moved that chair because it moved back. It obeyed physics, not policy. It was honest. Predictable. Knowable. I didn’t have to explain why I needed that interaction,I just moved, and it moved. And in that moment, I remembered what agency felt like, even if it only extended across thirty square feet.

When I say the room saved me, I mean that literally. It gave me visible proof that I still mattered. That something changed when I acted. That I could still leave a mark. That’s not decoration. That’s a feedback loop for staying alive.

Color as Proof of Life

There is something grotesque about being forced to prove your own existence. About having to stack your credibility like paperwork just to be treated as real. When your pain is doubted, your clarity pathologized, and your testimony reframed as instability, you begin to wonder if you're still legible as a person at all.

That’s when the colors arrive.

Color doesn’t ask for a diagnosis code. It doesn’t require peer review. You choose it, apply it,and there it is. Immediate. Unambiguous. Yours.

I painted the walls purple to know, in the most literal sense possible, that I had caused something to change. That cause and effect still functioned somewhere, even if not in the medical system or the rights complaint portal or the bureaucratic oubliette where my last appeal went to die. Every hue was an ontological dare: I was here. I did this. Touch the wall and tell me I didn’t.

Long-term gaslighting doesn't just blur your feelings,it unravels your sense of chronology. You start reading your own journals like a detective. You search your inbox for emails you know you sent, doubting your own timeline. People think trauma is about what happened. More often, it’s about what didn’t: the apology that never came. The reply that never arrived. The acknowledgment that was always postponed,until later, until never.

Color interrupts that erasure. Color does not ghost you.

The chaotic glitter explosion in the bathroom, the hand dyed purple carpet, the ombre glitter kitchen counter,,none of it was decor. It was timestamp. Anchor. Testimony. A record of choice made visible. A reminder that, at least once, I acted and the world bore witness.

That’s more than I can say for most institutions I’ve interacted with.

Painting a room mid-breakdown creates the only kind of reality check that sticks. You don’t need to reread your trauma letter to prove it happened. You just have to touch the wall. The pigment becomes a witness that doesn’t require re-explaining. A memory you don’t have to defend. A physical echo that doesn’t vanish when you’re too tired to speak.

It was never about whether it looked good. That’s capitalism whispering in your ear, asking if your breakdown matches the buyer’s palette. The real question isn’t does it coordinate? Does it prove I was alive when I applied it?

And yes. It does.

Aesthetics of Refusal

There’s a difference between making a home and staging a life. What I did wasn’t about taste. It was about refusal. Refusal to vanish. Refusal to assimilate. Refusal to soften myself into something digestible for institutions that wanted a quieter, cleaner version of me. My home is not tasteful. It’s not neutral. It’s not designed for approval. It’s loud. It’s strange. It’s unrepentantly mine. And it was never meant to be seen by anyone but me.

When your survival is treated like an overreaction, when your distress is filed under “complex case” and politely ignored, you stop explaining. You start encoding. You turn your space into a manifesto. The gold bust wasn’t décor,it was a raised middle finger to professionalized empathy. The purple carpet wasn’t whimsy,it was revolt. Every visual decision was a sentence in a language no intake form can read. This is the aesthetics of noncompliance.

Minimalism is marketed as virtue. Austerity as moral depth. But you can only afford to disappear when you’ve already been seen. You have to be safe to go quiet. I wasn’t safe. I wasn’t recognized. I had to get loud, in pigment, in placement, in absurdity,because every other channel had been muted.

You don’t build a room like this because you’re quirky. You build it because authorship is all you have left. When your appeals vanish into systems that reduce you to metrics, when your humanity is treated as a liability, you assert it wherever you still can. Not with permission. Not with polish. But with paint and fabric and objects that obey no logic but your own.

This isn’t kitsch. It’s not eccentricity. This is political design under testimonial suppression. I didn’t make the room pretty. I made it sovereign.

And now? Now I’m expected to scrub it bare. To neutralize it. To erase myself so someone else can walk in and imagine their beige, upwardly-mobile future here. That’s what staging means: cleansing. Extraction of the former occupant. Removal of the subject so the buyer can insert themselves without discomfort.

But this room was never meant to be clean. It was never meant to comfort anyone but me. It was built to be true. And that truth deserves more than a passing glance from someone looking for “potential.” This was my resistance. My war paint. My only uncensored canvas.

Let them whisper. Let them mock the colors, call it “a lot.” I hope they feel the gravity of it anyway. I hope they walk in and know, someone fought to exist here.

The Justice of Selling a Lifeboat

This home saved my life. And now I have to sell it like a defective product.

I have three months. Three months to unload the only space that ever affirmed my existence,while broke, depleted, and barely able to stand, let alone coordinate realtors and open houses. I’m being forced to auction off the one place that never gaslit me. Where cause still led to effect. I put paint on the wall, and it stayed. That’s more responsiveness than I ever got from a therapist, a tribunal, or a benefits officer.

And here’s the insult: I won’t get to leave with dignity. No curated farewell. No tasteful narrative closure. I can’t afford that. I can’t manage that. So it will be sold as is,which, in truth, means in pain. The walls will still shout. The corners will still carry the bruises of collapse. The colors will still clash. They were never meant to match.

And still, they’ll come. Realtors. Buyers. Strangers with bank accounts and free afternoons, wandering through my trauma like it’s a design flaw. They’ll whisper. They’ll joke. They’ll say things like “bold choice” and “so much potential” and “we’d definitely have to repaint.” They’ll speak of resale value while standing in the exact spot I used to cry on the floor.

They’ll see a fixer-upper. They won’t see a psychiatric ark.

This isn’t just financial precarity. This is existential dispossession. I’m not just losing equity,I’m being evicted from the only structure that ever bore witness. The market doesn’t care that this place held me when nothing else did. The bank doesn’t care that these rooms were built out of necessity and papered in resistance. They want blank canvases. I gave them testimony. They want clean lines. I gave them bloodlines.

There’s a kind of injustice that never makes headlines. No slur. No scandal. Just quiet bureaucratic abandonment: no help, no scaffolding, and then,at the bitter end,a request to remain professional as you dismantle your own lifeboat.

This house is not an asset. It’s a reliquary.

And I am being asked to strip it of its sacredness so someone else can imagine their own beige peace here without friction. That’s what resale demands: aesthetic euthanasia. Kill the story. Erase the struggle. Pretend it was always this easy.

But it wasn’t.

And I won’t pretend it was.

The Room That Believed Me

I was told to document everything. And I did. I kept records, filed complaints, wrote appeals in a dozen bureaucratic dialects. I narrated my pain with footnotes. Most of it vanished,into inboxes, into silence, into the procedural abyss where accountability goes to die.

This room never asked for proof.

It didn’t need my credentials. It didn’t ask for diagnostic codes or a more professional tone. It simply absorbed what I gave it. It held it. It didn’t escalate. It didn’t correct. It didn’t pathologize. It just stayed. It changed when I needed movement. It stilled when I needed rest. It gave me back what every system stole: continuity.

And that matters,more than most will ever understand.

The ceiling never questioned my function. The purple held. The walls didn’t care why there were gold busts at eye level,they just held them up. The lights didn’t critique their crooked installation. They just turned on. The objects in this room cooperated. They responded. They bore witness.

That’s more than I can say for most systems I’ve survived.

Now, I have to leave. Not because I’m ready. Not because I’m well. But because the legal machinery has decided I’m no longer a viable investment. The bank wants its return. The market wants its margin. The state wants plausible deniability. No one wants the story.

But this room knew the story. It lived it with me.

When I said I was unwell, it made space. When I said I needed beauty, it gave me surface. When I needed to prove I existed, it gave me walls. And that’s more justice than any tribunal ever offered me.

I don’t know where I go from here. I don’t know what shape the next version of me will take. But I know what happened in this home was real. I made meaning out of chaos. I made testimony out of textiles. I survived in a register the world refused to validate, and I left marks that do not apologize.

So let them mock it. Let them call it cluttered, loud, strange. Good. It was never meant to be clean.

It was meant to be mine.

And when I hand over the keys, it won’t be because I let go.

It’ll be because I was never given a hand to hold.

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Aesthetics of refusal