Where We Live: “A sanctuary and a prison, my room can be both”

He creates a comfortable environment for himself, reflecting a mind in search of balance and harmony, and how his room can be both a prison and a sanctuary.

“You have arrived at your destination”, Google Maps blurs from my headphones. I am standing on a side street close to the center of the Enschede in front of another typical Dutch house. The old entrance was replaced and closed off, I reckon that the new entrance has to be somewhere on the backside. I glance into the alley next to the house where a new face opens the gate to the backyard. “Hi! It’s nice to meet you, call me O.J.!”, he greets me.

Together with five roommates Ogulcan lives in a large student house. He is currently a second-year International HRM student at the Academie Mens en Arbeid (AMA) at Saxion and has been living in the Netherlands since his family moved here from Turkey five years ago. For around one year now he can call his current room his home. Stepping into his place I immediately notice the organized and thoughtful placement of furniture.

O.J. tells me that the past few months have been quite eventful for him. He had a friend from Turkey stay with him for a couple of weeks during the May vacation. What happened then? Together they went on a psychedelic trip, but it went out of control quickly. He reveals that sometimes he likes to broaden his mind through psychedelic trips: “It makes you think differently, and that can be quite interesting.”

For him, this was not necessarily a bad experience. He rather views it as an intense deep and eye-opening journey that led him to reflection. He shares a personal saying with me: "If you don't know the right questions to ask, the answers you get from a trip might startle you or catch you off guard. That's why I'm always looking for the right questions."

However, after having such an experience, it was hard for him to feel safe not only in his room but also in the student house itself. Over time he luckily recovered and things are going back to normal. 

“It is my goal to create a comfortable space for me and also my friends”, he states. Indeed this is true, his room vibrates with a calm, relaxed, and welcoming energy, but possibly O.J.’s calmed personality could play a part in this too. With the thoughtful arrangements in his room, he constantly tries to create multiple different corners.

O.J. describes this separation approach as ‘personal utility’. Everything he did with the room, be it building his bunk bed, or putting up the shelves on the wall, was to create places for different parts of his life. The reason? He doesn’t like to be stuck in one space. Be it journaling on his comfy couch, playing piano, or working on school assignments, everything has its dedicated place. But a true interior designer never rests, so thinks O.J.: “There is much more to be done!”

Want to find out more about a certain object or area? Then you can explore the space further by hovering over the hotspots in the interactive images. They might reveal some interesting stories.

In situations like these O.J. sometimes feels trapped in his room. “It can be both a sanctuary and a prison.”, he says in a very philosophical way. After a long stressful day, he often seeks the sanctuary of his so well-known home, especially because his personal beliefs in organization and cleanliness sometimes clash with those of his roommates.

Other times he feels trapped, like sitting inside a prison where the only thing you do is work, work, work. Especially when his room gets a little messy he often dislikes or even avoids going home. To him, the chaos can quickly feel like a burden. He needs harmony in his room.

We start to talk about the concept of ‘Feng-Shui’ a system of laws and rules about the alignment and harmony between individuals and their surrounding environments. An interesting concept in O.J.’s eyes. He thinks that the more he is aligned with his environment the more comfort he gets, and the more alive he feels. His goal is to transform his room and infuse it with his very own vibe at one point.

In the middle of our conversation, he suddenly jumps up: “I have to show you something!” We go outside into the backyard. As humans, we have different places to be in in our lives. We have our first space, which is usually our home. Then there is the second space which includes being with family and friends. And then there are third spaces.

With those spaces being cafes, cinemas, bars, or parks, they slowly seem to vanish. One reason for that is the rise of mobile phones, the internet, and computers, where we choose to communicate digitally rather than hanging out physically, which makes the demand for third places decrease. O.J. wanted to create such a third space in the shed.

“This was once a trashy shed, but I just recently made a hangout spot out of it”, O.J. explains as he opens the door to a very ordinary garden shed, but what is inside is rather extraordinary. In a once trashed-up and filthy little shed with broken furniture, he created a so-called third space. He replaced the furniture and added décor, even a TV and Playstation to play games or watch movies and TV shows.

“Please don’t hesitate to interrupt me when I am talking too much, I tend to do that… I just have my thoughts coming out like this.” Ogulcan is what Gen Z would call a ‘thought son’, a newer slang term originating from TikTok. ‘Thought sons’ or ‘thought daughters’ are basically people who have constant thought streams inside of their heads. When he was just nine years old O.J. started journaling to write down his thoughts. What you could’ve called a diary back then actually turned into something more serious two years ago.

But why does he journal?
One part of journaling is that he has a dedicated place to write down and collect his thoughts, but it can also help him in a lot of other different ways. It allows processing emotions, be it good or bad, or just gathering new insights that he discovered about literally anything. He reveals that he often feels the need to write down his thoughts and findings during the day. While saying that he gets up and shows me a variety of journals that are spread across his room: A small one in his jacket for on-the-go, one next to his pillow in bed, one on his bookshelf. A journal in every corner, for any case that might arise where he wants to add a new entry.

A microphone next to his desk makes me ask what he uses it for. “I make podcasts!”. Sadly not any public podcast for the ones wondering. The recordings are just for him and sometimes together with a friend. The hobby started back during the pandemic when we mostly existed in online spaces, whereas for Ogulcan it was online video games. People have been complimenting him about his calm and easy-to-listen-to voice, so he decided to buy a better microphone and just start recording: “Appears I have a lot to say and people like to listen.” Now he likes to document anything about life, psychology, or spirituality.

Who knows, maybe he will go public one day and we can all hear what is on Ogulcan’s mind.