Tales From a Childhood Bedroom
On Lingering Patterns
Before I moved into my current apartment, I had lived in the same bedroom in the same house for about twenty-two years. Throughout my life, I’ve had a precarious relationship with the room - with its decor, with its rotating inhabitants, and with its ever-wavering aura, shifting from comfortable to terrifying and back to comfortable over years, weeks, and hours. Throughout its metamorphosis, I’ve found the room to be a humorous reflection of my brain - of its sense of taste and state of being. The two seem to be tied up in a silent conversation that spans decades. A conversation I wasn’t able to access, at least in part, until recently.
My parents declined to learn the gender of their firstborn, so the room started fairly gender-neutral, decoration-wise: yellow walls with green accents and dragonfly decals above the crib. By the time I could start talking, I declared that the room needed to make a girlish pivot. The walls were painted pink. A twin bed with a pull-out trundle for sleepovers was installed, with a ballerina tulle canopy draped overhead. I had a small white bookshelf, stuffed to the brim with picture books, and soon chapter books, including Junie B. Jones, Magic Treehouse, Nancy Drew, and soon after that, the complete Percy Jackson & the Olympians set. The closet was replete with Disney princess costumes - I would dress as Belle from Beauty and the Beast as often as my parents allowed. I liked her because she also liked to read.
Upon this canvas, I imbued my personality with childish touches. High School Musical posters were ripped out of Tiger Beat and fastened on the wall with Scotch tape that made the paint peel. Scholastic book fair stickers were stuck behind the bookshelf for safekeeping. Stick figure sketches were plastered on the wall. A diary was hidden under the bed.
As I transitioned into tweenhood, my bedroom transformed from the room I slept in into the room I spent most of my time in. I binged young adult, dystopian book series, and television shows and fell deep into YouTube rabbit holes from the comfort of my bed. When my presence wasn’t asked at the dinner table, I was in my bedroom. To an extent, this is simply what young teenagers do. To another extent, I found my bedroom to be a refuge from a home otherwise slipping into a state of disarray. A cast of family members rotated through my room to cry and sleep through collective pain. Stomps and stumbles would grow louder until my door swung open, screams bouncing off my walls. My little sister toddled in time and time again after her night terrors. The room was a haven and a hell.
When I was little, I had an irrational fear of getting kidnapped that scared me straight. I was terrified of being left alone, whether it was walking home from school by myself or sitting in the car for ten minutes while a parent made a quick grocery run. My response to this was vigilance - proactivity. My bedroom was the closest to the front door of our house, meaning that - in the event of a kidnapper - I would not only be the first kid to get snatched up but also the first to hear the intruder and warn the rest of the house. I slept, bravely, with my door open, eyes wide, staring out the window that looked onto the street, prepared to protect my family as best as a young child could.
While my fear of kidnappers faded with time, my learned insomnia didn’t. Laying awake petrified remained a routine habit, anticipating the house’s commotion and the internal calamity that spouted as a result of it. My fear of abduction transformed into a fear of failure. Percentages floated through my head as I tried to fall asleep, agonizing over whether being a tenth of a point off from my ideal grade destined me for an inadequate life.
I recently read The Haunting of Hill House and in the edition I own, Laura Miller writes a poignant introduction, explaining how extreme comfort can border on claustrophobia. Author Shirley Jackson writes that Victorians designed the interior of the haunted Hill House and “buried themselves in folds of velvet and tassels and purple plush.” Hill House has a cozy nature - soft beds, surrounding hills, warm meals - but Miller writes that “its cushioned embrace is suffocating.”
During my restless teenage nights, it felt as though I might slip through the folds of my copious sheets and blankets and drown in my mattress. The weight of my comforter would go from grounding to crushing as the thoughts rushed in. During this point in my life, I didn’t feel energized enough to update my bedroom’s decor to be more mature - the children’s books remained crammed on their tiny shelves, the dusty stickers began to peel off the walls. Clean and dirty clothes piled around my bed in small mounds like land mines that I danced around as I got dressed every morning. At night, wavering in and out of consciousness, the piles of clothes shape-shifted into amorphous forms that might suffocate me too. One week, when I was bedridden with the flu, I was certain that balled-up socks on the floor were rats.
It wasn’t until I returned home as a young adult amid the pandemic that my room underwent a true grown-up upgrade - with the generous help of my loved ones. The clothes crammed in drawers were sorted and packed away for Goodwill. Stickers were peeled off the walls and replaced with acrylic paintings I made to stay happy during lockdown. I installed floating shelves and stacked new books beloved by my adult self on them. I dwelled here for another year and a half, rising early to do yoga flows and listen to the neighborhood birds sing their morning songs, grasping onto some stability in an unstable world within a formerly unstable house.
I feel a flurry of emotions when I sleep in the room upon visiting home now. It’s still technically my bedroom but also acts as a guest room. As such, the bedspread contains neat, grey stripes. Some of the paintings remain. The closet contains old relics I’ve left behind - yearbooks and homecoming dresses - along with overflow from my sisters’ closets and assorted pieces of luggage. Twenty-two years of history in one room. Upon first glance, it looks and smells like an Airbnb. When I settle under the covers and stare out that window that I long stared out with bloodshot, adolescent eyes, the room buzzes back to life. The long-held fears flood my chest, and though my body can never quite forget the scary feelings, my weathered mind assuages itself to the best of its ability, with shaky, but gradual success.
When I feared kidnappers, every bump in the night would make me jump. After some time, I began to feel more comfortable with the idea that my house was haunted. And in some ways, I suppose that is the case. When I sit at my desk and sleep in my bed, the good and the bad linger like sediments in a wine glass. Like cobwebs in an attic that you can’t seem to fully clear. It’s in this way that my bedroom feels as though it has a direct line of communication with my brain - a physical manifestation of my lingering desires, fears, and personal quandaries.
Much like the memories of my bedroom, I earnestly try to rid myself of the unsavory habits developed in my past - developed because of things that happened in that exact house. But I haven’t seemed to fully do so, and perhaps I never fully will. The patterns have a way of loitering in my bloodstream. Every tear and blunder feels like a setback. It’s easier to think something’s simply been fixed in my genetic code. That I’m indefinitely tied up with some ghost that I’ll never be able to shake, like a creaky old house and its phantom. It’s easiest to resign myself to my haunting.
I’m learning that the path forward doesn’t have to be resignation - but can begin with recognition. When I look out the window of that bedroom, I look through it as my five-year-old and twelve-year-old selves, as well as my twenty-three-year-old self. I carry the sticker stains with me, I hear the screams ricochet off the walls. I’m in a perpetual state of relearning and retrying, and I am ever-changing and also ever-marked. Marked but not fixed, importantly. We can’t help but be stained by the delights and horrors of our pasts, all of which make us uniquely brilliant and troubled. But that in no way detracts from our ability to change. To reinvent, to refurbish, to become new again and again. I’m learning to make peace with my bedroom, and as such, I plan to eventually make peace with my mind.
If you enjoyed reading this piece, I recommend reading my essay “On Sleeplessness” which touches on similar themes of perfectionism and learned behavioral patterns.
So we all gave our childhood bedrooms adult makeovers in the pandemic huh
really hit close to home. Every time I come back to my childhood home, something is different. Boxes and miscellaneous items are in there. Then, even if I clean it up, it never feels the same as when I first left it. I feel like I'm intruding in someone else's room even though it's mine.