A Window Into My Soul
It takes me a very long time to find the motivation to get out of bed every morning. I look all around my bedroom multiple times before I tumble out of bed. That room was given to me when I moved into the house I live in now during the time I was about six. My room is strategically placed next to my parent’s room, as I was very timid growing up with off and on nightmares and night scares. But it was also the biggest bedroom in the house with plenty of heat in the winter, plenty of cold air in the summer and three windows while the rest of the bedrooms in my house only have two. It is a nice room to live in. I really lucked out on the day of room assignments.
As some of you may know, little girls have a tendency to love pink and purple and pastel colors and I was no different. A few weeks after we moved in, my walls were painted light pink. Over time, I have accumulated many stuffed animals, a few lamps, three or four different bed sheet and comforter sets and lots and lots of stuff. Mothers know what kind of “stuff” I’m referring to. The kind of stuff that take up too much space and have no underlying purpose besides looking nice in the corner or entertains children for a few weeks until the novelty wears off. So that once empty pastel pink room has been filled, and at this point cluttered, with clothes, toys, stuffed animals, etc., and as I grew older, my room became occupied with different items that reflected my interests during each stage of my elementary school life all the way up to high school. From violins to tap shoes, arts and crafts supplies and field hockey uniforms and many more, my room was never short of something creative happening in it.
Unfortunately I don’t have the best of memories in my room. It was where I found myself the most depressed, where I would run to after a fight with my parents, where I would isolate myself to avoid the world, and where I tried to end my life. Nonetheless, it is still my bedroom and I love being in it for many reasons, but the main one being that it’s not a room in a mental hospital. In an effort to try and avoid reliving those memories every day, I kept rearranging my furniture until I got it just right. But “just right” is never actually right considering the fact that the placement of each piece of furniture I own is constantly being moved around in one way or another.
To jump to the main point, as I grow into a young adult, I believe that our bedrooms say a lot about who we are as people and reflects what grows in the deepest places of our hearts. In my case, I think the rearranging of my furniture every few months and never being completely satisfied with it must correlate in some way to my life changing all the time with me never entirely okay with whatever the change was that occured. I believe that my stuffed animals reflect on my caring personality, as I used to pretend that they were students in a classroom that I would set up with my sister every weekend. And as my interests in clothing has changed, the drawers of my bureau have become filled with band T-shirts and colorful leggings. But the old little kid TV characters, from mouse ears to princesses, are still stuffed in there as well.
In my opinion, my bedroom is a window into my soul. It sounds really weird to phrase it that way, but I believe it to be true. You can discover so much about me just by walking around in my room and looking at all of the different things I have in there. My old things are combined with the new, and I don’t really throw anything away, especially if it is symbolic or nostalgic in nature. So there are picture frames of me with my friends in a dance show in 9th grade. There is a fake flower I got from an ice show when I was little. I have makeup in one corner and a religious character in the other, but that twin size canopy bed off to the side of my room has remained, transitioning me from elementary school to the end of high school.
The way I’m describing the items that live in my room makes me sound like some sort of pack rat which in some ways can be very true. But as a sentimental person, I can’t just throw away the bears that I hugged tight which assured me that there were no monsters in my closet or the picture I have of when my sister first came home. What items are in your room and what do they say about you? Are there any memories that you would want to hold onto for the rest of your life?
I think it will be an interesting day when I need to move out of the room that I’m in, simply because of all the memories made in there that I will hold onto forever. The great part about this whole thing is that the memories you make in your childhood room, both good and bad, will stick with you for a lifetime. From colorful night lights to the sound of the door opening when my Dad arrived home from work, these moments will stay in my heart forever. And at the end of the day, who needs much more than that?
