The Many Rooms We Live In
We carry different versions of ourselves like separate rooms in a house.
Some are bright and loud—filled with music, with the kind of laughter that shakes the walls. Others are quiet, lined with books and soft light, where we speak in low tones only to the ones who truly listen.
We move between these rooms depending on the day, the company, or the weight of the world’s expectations. Some doors we open wide. Others we keep locked, not out of shame, but out of the need to protect what’s sacred.
And sometimes, the house itself feels unfamiliar. As if someone has rearranged the furniture in the night. As if we are visitors in our own skin—standing in the doorway of the room that feels most like home, only to be told we do not belong there.
I have learned that the trick is not to make every room feel welcoming to everyone else, but to make it a place where you can breathe. To claim the spaces that fit, even when others question why you are there at all.
The rooms we live in are not just where we exist—they are the architecture of who we are. Some we outgrow. Some we return to again and again. Some we build ourselves, brick by brick, because no one thought to give us the key.
And the greatest freedom is this: to walk through your own house without apology. To dance in the rooms that make you feel alive. To linger in the quiet ones when you need rest. To let the music spill from one into another.
Because you are allowed to live fully in every version of yourself.
And no one—not the world, not its rules, not the voices that say otherwise—gets to tell you which rooms are yours.
