Two years later, instead of facing the entrance exam head-on, I chose a field in which I could get in with less effort and had a better chance of being accepted: languages, exclusively. After the preliminary results came out, while choosing my major, I thought to myself: I already studied English at a language institute, so why not study French?

And that was how I entered university for the first time, as a French literature student. I lasted three semesters. That was it. Neither the university nor French literature lived up to my expectations. It felt like a waste of time. I had learned English at a language institute, with far less time and money, and had learned it much better than I was learning French at university. After that I entered university in two other fields, studying each for a semester or two before dropping it. Music and software. Neither satisfied me. I wanted a special profession. But that special profession required persistence and discipline—qualities I did not have and could not seem to acquire. I hated anything resembling order, and every few days this became one of the reasons for another argument with my mother: Why was my room such a mess? Why did I throw my clothes into whatever corner I happened to reach when I came home? Why, in short, did I refuse to follow order in the way she thought it should be followed?

I wasn’t dirty. Quite the opposite: I was sensitive about cleanliness and dirt. I simply had no system, and whenever I wanted something, I could never find it.

My father, meanwhile, almost always took my mother’s side, supposedly to keep me from becoming too cheeky. But this only made me laugh more, because he gave my mother the moral high ground in words while being hardly any more orderly than I was himself. Eventually, our endless arguments always reached the same point. My mother would say, “When you have your own house, make as much of a mess as you like. But this is our home. It has rules, and everyone has to respect them.”

Both my parents were educators. My father was a physical-education teacher, and my mother was a school disciplinarian.

When I turned twenty-five, I announced that I wanted to live alone. My parents, firmly and unanimously, said it was impossible and told me to get the idea out of my head.

Two months later, I had my first independent home. Two streets away from my parents’ house. It was a rented place of about fifty square meters, and half the salary I earned from that dreary job went toward the rent. That was the job’s only advantage: it had made independence possible for me. I moved almost all the personal belongings I had kept in my room at my parents’ house into my own place.

It would be childish to think I had wanted independence merely so I could make a mess. The truth was that the spirit of independence had always been surging inside me.

Until I started elementary school, I slept most nights in my parents’ room. After I fell asleep, they would carry me to my own room. During my first year of school, about a month after the school year began, my teacher gave us a short talk about how we were growing up and should be able to sleep separately from our parents. That little speech had a lasting effect on me.