Between Worlds: Building the Room

The thing I keep coming back to is that I spent most of my life learning how to survive rooms.

Different houses, different schools, different workplaces, different versions of myself depending on what each one seemed to require. I got very good at it. Reading what was needed before anyone asked. Adjusting without being told to. Making myself useful and easy and present in whatever way the space seemed to call for. I moved through a lot of rooms that way and I fit into most of them well enough that nobody would have known the fitting took anything out of me at all.

What I didn’t understand while all of that was happening was that I was never really looking for a room to fit into. I was looking for a place to land. Somewhere that didn’t require a different version of me at the door. Somewhere I could just be the same person all the way through.

I didn’t find that room. So eventually, slowly, in ways I am still not sure I can fully explain, I started trying to build one.

Maybe that’s why I keep finding myself in conversations with people standing at their own crossroads. People trying to figure out what comes next after a job ends, a relationship changes, a diagnosis arrives, a dream falls apart, or a new one refuses to leave them alone. I recognize that terrain because I’ve lived there.

I spent my life searching for somewhere to belong. Somewhere along the way I started building it instead.

That feels like the truest thing I have written in this entire series. And I am still in the middle of it, which means the building is not finished, which means there is still more to this story than I know yet.