The coveted Room with a Door
An invitation by SmallStack to explain the name of my publication, and some details (with pictures) from inside my room with a door.
*This post is linked to SmallStack and based on an invitation to share the reason why I named my publication Room with a Door.
To sum it up quickly:
Doesn’t every writer* covet a room with a door to call their own?
*Or an artist, for that matter. Or a musician…
Think about it:
A room with a door you can shut evokes an image of uninterrupted, inspired creativity. It also evokes an image of uninterrupted, inspired thinking.
A thought turns into a mental vision and, with measured action, turns into the desired outcome.
Like Michelangelo freeing David from a slab of marble, the Wright brothers sending humans to fly across the sky in metal tubes with wings, and Thomas Edison lighting up our world with his ubiquitous light bulb, it all began with a single thought.
I wanted - needed - a room with a door of my own desperately to cultivate my thoughts into action to form tangible outcomes, without interruptions or distractions. And then one day, it happened.
Blessings in disguise
The room with a door I coveted for two decades arrived in my life some years ago, during one of the numerous lockdown periods this province suffered through, and it has evolved since that time into a sanctuary.
My private sanctuary.
Those pandemic years feel a bit like a blessing in disguise now, in hindsight…
I’ve done quite a lot to my room with a door in terms of making it mine.
My room with a door - the physical one, not the publication - is one of four bedrooms in the house I grew up in, where my widowed mom continues to live to this day. The room in question was originally my sister’s room and over the years functioned as a guest room and the grandchildren’s room.
As the grandchildren grew into teens, my sister’s room remained vacant more and more, until one day my mom suggested I take it as my writing room.
To be honest, I consider that room with its requisite door as single-handedly responsible for preventing a clinical mental breakdown.
It is inside that room, with the door firmly shut, where I coined my substack publication’s name.
The physical room with a door
When I first moved in to my room with a door, I was a discombobulated, overwhelmed, an emotionally unstable mess riddled with guilt, confusion and a lot of built-up anger. This state of being was already well underway before the pandemic happened, but then the incessant rigid restrictions and forced lockdowns exasperated it. Comparing my situation to those of multi-generational families locked into cramped apartments did nothing to turn my simmering rage into practical gratitude; was I thankful I had a house instead of a cramped apartment? Yes, fleetingly. But I didn’t feel gratitude. It didn’t last. I couldn’t make it stick. Every time I entered my house, a mixed bag of volatile emotions immediately seeped into my consciousness:
I love my family, I'm grateful we are all here and safe, but I can't even with the mess and clutter. Where should I go to collect my thoughts? How do I calm myself? Where is my space? How do I find a spot where I can go to recalibrate and decompress?
Meh.
Having that physical room with a door at my mom’s house was a life-saver.
Establishing boundaries and privacy
My mom, the only other permanent resident in that house with my room with a door, respected my wishes and never, ever interrupted me when the door was closed. If something was up, she would simply text me. (I love technology, what an amazing time we live in today.) I learned to trust very slowly that here, in my private sanctuary, privacy was assured.
Once I occupied my room with a door officially, it took me many months to decompress. I battled with guilt and remorse, I second-guessed all my adult decisions, I worried about everything that was both in and beyond my control, but I also learned how to breathe, how to meditate, and how to be. I learned to reconnect with my inner essence, my individuality, the part that wasn't connected to mom-life or wife-life. I could do this because I was in alone, in a room with a door, for the first time in almost 20 years.
Making it mine
At first, I just left the room as it was, but over time, I made some adjustments to accommodate my needs and esthetic purposes. As a Libra with a Cancer moon, I need minimalist beauty around me, tidy, organized spaces void of clutter.
The desk already in there was my first challenge; it was too high for laptops (because, when we were kids in the 1980s, there were no computers), so I tried out a bunch of different office chairs until one finally fit.
Next, I removed the center drawer. This allowed me to accommodate the chair’s height without scratching my legs on the bottom part of the middle drawer.
Later, I realized my posture was causing me neck and back pain. I found an unused contraption thingy back at the family house which I was able to place my laptop on to make it line up with my head. No more looking down. I plugged an external keyboard in, and voila, I was able to sit there and type until my fingers bled.
One day I removed most of the photos and pictures on the walls and installed, with the help of my teen girl, a whiteboard which I used as a vision board, or for note taking, or for list making. I hung up a few photos and pictures of the kids, a little bit of art, added a few items which sometimes get rotated or replaced with new ones, but mostly left the walls blank.
I need, more than anything, white space to surround me. Too many decorative items covering all the white space makes me irritable and overly stimulated. This in turn impedes my writing, thinking and other creativity. I mentioned this one day on my personal blog and one of my subscribers suggested I may be an HSP. (Highly Sensitive Person: the answer is yes, I am an HSP, I match all the symptoms.)
The room is of course a bedroom and therefore has a futon one of us kids brought home post University. I struggled to get comfortable and after about a year of sleeping on it, I initiated some changes. Long story short, a new mattress was purchase and a mattress topper was added and now, I have a more comfortable bed all to myself to lie down on to read, think or research.
Bliss!
I don’t even let the beagle share my futon-bed when he comes over for a sleepover. Let him sleep with grandma. (He does, quite happily.)
Even later still, I schlepped a narrow coffee table up to my room with a door and set it up with all my witchy contraptions: tarot cards, crystals, candles, little meaningful knickknacks, vases with flower or herbs, whatever suited my fancy. For Halloween I decorated it and added fairy lights, for Christmas I changed it again. I now have a place to sit quietly any time I want to or feel drawn to my cards and do a tarot reading to help me dig deep and find out what, if anything, is blocking me. This, too, helped me recalibrate during moments of discombobulation, re-align me and ultimately unleashed my creativity into physical form.
I lived in that room with a door on and off throughout the lockdown/pandemic years and traveled back and forth to the family house to deal with whatever needed to be dealt with.
There is more to this story but this is not the time to detail it. The point is, after years of writing and creating in a cluttered house at a dining table with constant interruptions, I now have a room with a door to go to which belonged to me and only contained things I put there myself.
The publication Room with a Door
Ironically, I am typing into my Room with a Door publication from the family house at the aforementioned cluttered dining table. There are reasons which I’ll spare you at the moment, but as a GenX mom - also aptly called the Sandwich Generation - I sometimes need to be in two places at the same time. Since this isn’t possible, I choose one or the other and adapted.
Since returning from my European trip back in April, I have spent most of my time back at the family house in the city. It’s summer, the back deck is a temporary sanctuary which we use for various purposes, and I am able to type at the dining table mostly because routines are less frenzied during the summer months. I'm much calmer these days, enjoy the family time at this house, and make a big effort to contain the self-limiting thoughts during minor momentary derailments. The family has adapted well and with older kids (late teens, one has already moved out), the clutter has reduced significantly.
However, writing at the dining table continues to be challenging. The kitchen to the right of me is a high traffic area, and I know my sighing and body language makes the family members feel like they are in my way. I recognize they have a right to be in this house as much as I do, and I try very hard to remain focused despite the little noises emitting from nearby.
However, I also acknowledge that even the tiniest interruption requires an increase in focus which in turn requires an influx of energy.
When I use creative energy to dispel interrupting noises, my writing capacity suffers.
I'm not sure how to explain this exactly: When a distraction occurs, I have to force myself to shut out said distraction to prevent the inevitable interruption to maintain in creative flow. This takes a lot of energy I’d rather not spend on concentration. I am not good at this. I want to use my creative energy for my output, not on shutting out distracting noises.
Writing in the family house is doable but an imperfect solution and I'm getting better at managing this, but the yearning for the room with a door emerges regularly.
It is during moments like these when I turn to my substack publication aptly named Room with a Door. Just looking at the name allows me to pretend I’m in my sacred space.
Substack publication
I started this publication less than a year ago and already changed its original intent several times. For now, the main writing falls under Room with a Door, but I have two other sections I enjoy dropping essays into: my witchy section Bella Luna, and my Travel section where I write about my most recent trip (but will include other trips at a later date). I used to be a Flight Attendant and have a few stories up my sleeve which I can’t wait to recall and write about at some point…
For now, my publication remains small and intimate. Some of my subscribers have followed me to substack from my personal blog where I enjoy a large and engaging audience.
Part of me likes that my substack remained small and intimate, although of course I continue to invite readers from my other writing streams to drop by and have a look around. Which is why, when the publication SmallStack invited writers to explain the name for their publication, I was inspired and immediately decided to contribute. Here is what they said:
Thank you Robin Taylor and team, for encouraging me to write this post.
Concluding remarks
I feel it is justified to formally thank my entire family for having made this room with a door adventure possible for me; my mom for offering a room in her house, and my family for holding it together when I'm not with them. I find it difficult to explain just how important the room with a door is to me, and how much I feel drawn to writing even if much of what I type into my various screens remains stored in a draft folder up in a cloud where no one can read it.
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You have a beautiful sanctuary! With beagle and everything...Lovely.
Still alive😂 Casa Cuckoo has relocated to a 2 bedroom apartment, and King Ben is on Summer Break.
Never a dull moment🤪
💌💌