My Room Has Grown Too Small
A room I loved, a life I was preparing to leave, and a sentence in an old journal that found its way back to me nearly ten years later.
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The first thing I need to tell you is that the room really wasn’t that small.
In fact, it was probably the largest bedroom I’d ever had. A king-size bed occupied only part of it. Large windows stretched across the west side, filling the room with plenty of daylight. There was a wood-burning fireplace that made it especially comforting during those dreary, gray wintery days.
On a brighter day, with the sun shining through those windows, a fire going and the animals scattered across the bed, I could disappear into that room for hours.
I loved that room.
So did the dogs. And the cats. They would pile onto the large bed with me, perfectly content to spend hours there.
Apparently, the word got out.
Because then the bats began to arrive.
I never figured out where they were coming from. I became convinced they were entering through the in-floor registers, so I added screens. It didn’t help. I can’t count how many nights I awoke to the sound of a bat tapping the blinds.
Oddly, I seemed to be the only one particularly bothered by this.
The dogs and even the cats barely reacted. A bat could be making laps around the room while everyone else continued lounging as though it were just another regular, invited guest.
Somewhere along the way, the bedroom had become more than the place where I slept. It was the one place in the house where I felt most comfortable. Back then I wished to be surrounded by my very own things and wanted to be able to leave something somewhere and find it there later.
But my husband had his own decorating ideas about the house, including the bedroom. He had a tendency to rearrange things or add oddities of his own. Even whether he planned to spend his nights there with me wasn’t always clear.
I had an entire house.
But increasingly, my life seemed to be happening inside that one spacious room.
Nearly ten years later, I came across a journal page I’d written sometime in the early months of 2017.
Before I’d written anything about the size of my room, I had been writing about myself.
About how closely I held my energy. About keeping myself from other people hurting me.
And then I wrote:
My energy needs to expand.
I underlined expand three times, making sure I got the message.
There is something about that sentence I recognize immediately.
I still hold myself close.
The reason feels different now. I don’t think I’m particularly afraid of being hurt anymore. But I still hesitate sometimes. I don’t want expansion to blur the edges of what feels like mine. I’m more discerning now about what I allow into that space.
And I still want expansion.
I also want to remain able to recognize myself inside of it.
And apparently, somewhere in the middle of thinking about all of this in 2017, I compared what I was feeling to the physical space around me and wrote:
My room has grown too small.
There was another declaration on that same page:
I know now my being needs to try to make a difference in this world.
This is where Present Me gets a little embarrassed for Journal Me.
Who was I to make such a grand declaration?
Except there’s an issue.
I still believe it.
More than ever.
I don’t know what made me write I know now. I don’t remember suddenly discovering that desire. As far as I can tell, I’ve carried some version of it throughout most of my life.
Apparently the embarrassment and the knowing are allowed to live together.
At the time I wrote those words, I was longing for something new.
New people. New places. New meanings.
And especially, a new space of my own.
Not long afterward, I would leave that house—and the room I loved with it.
Expansion, at least then, looked fairly literal.
I wanted somewhere that belonged to me, where I could surround myself with the things I loved and decide for myself what stayed and what went where.
Reading the page now, I’m less certain that expansion has ever been only about physical space.
I’ve spent much of my life generating ideas. Some became projects. Some disappeared almost as quickly as they arrived. Some I thought I’d left behind actually still interest me, while others are probably totally dead.
And I’m hesitant to arrange them into a neat story.
But I do recognize the impulse underneath them.
Something in me keeps wanting more room.
Not necessarily more square footage.
More room to wonder.
More room to make things.
More room to change my mind.
More room for one idea to lead somewhere I hadn’t intended it to go.
Nearly ten years later, something is expanding again.
This time, it’s an ongoing project. A website.
The Perception Field began simply as a blog—a place to write about the things I was noticing and thinking about.
Then it began becoming more of a gallery.
Now it’s seeming more like a museum.
I didn’t plan that progression. The museum has been appearing as I’ve been writing. One installation suggests another. Old journals become artifacts. Rooms appear because something needs somewhere to go.
The more I make, the more room it seems to need.
And somehow, instead of feeling crowded by that, I want to see where it goes.
I don’t care to turn an old journal page into prophecy. The woman who wrote My energy needs to expand wasn’t secretly describing a museum she would build nearly ten years later.
She was living in a bedroom she loved inside a life that no longer seemed large enough.
She wanted something different.
And so do I.
There is one rather funny bit of irony in this story of expansion.
My actual room has gotten much smaller.
I live with my mother now, and my bedroom is roughly the size of a large closet. There isn’t much room for expansion within these four walls.
Creatively, though, the opposite seems to be happening.
It seems to be filling the space around me, even overflowing.
Nearly ten years later, I can still picture that spacious bedroom—the windows, the fireplace, the enormous bed full of animals.
Although, I could have done without the bats.
That room was never the problem.
Something in me wanted to move beyond the boundaries of the life surrounding it.
And something in me still does.
The difference is that now I’m building somewhere for it to go.
I really don’t know whether The Perception Field will ever become large enough for everything I want to create.
Maybe I’m less interested in how large it becomes than in seeing how it expands.
Maybe I don’t need a room large enough to contain everything that wants to emerge.
I just need somewhere the walls are allowed to move.