I’m currently in the process of moving into my brother’s old room. It’s not exactly a major shift. Same house, same hallway. But for some reason, it feels quite monumental.
I’ve been partially moved in for a few weeks now, but it still doesn’t feel like my room. I still find myself calling out to my little sisters: “I’m in Matthew’s room!” when they yell at me from the other side of the house.
cloudy gray
It was immediately obvious to me that I needed to paint the walls. Maybe if they were a different color, I pondered, the room would start to actually feel like my space. Unfortunately, as a chronic procrastinator, I’ve still only conquered two of the four walls, which has only caused the in-betweenness of the situation to be even more glaringly obvious.
I spent a very long time agonizing over the paint color. I took home the giant stack of samples from the paint store just so I could make sure I’d truly considered all of my options (I later found out that they’re only supposed to give their full catalog of paint swabs to corporate clients, which made me feel quite special and wonder if the paint man was flirting with me. Small thrills in a global pandemic).
I ultimately went with a color called ‘cloudy gray.’ Don’t let the name fool you into thinking it’s just any old boring gray — it’s a very dynamic neutral tone. It has notes of taupe, gray, beige, pink…even lilac, depending on the lighting and what mood you’re in. And that to me is very neat.
Prior to this big move, I was sharing a space with my older sister, who is also back to living in our family home post-graduation while paying off her student loan debt—an all too familiar circumstance for Gen Z/Millenial cuspers, a problem that is even more exasperated due to the effects of the pandemic (fun fact: the amount of 16-24 year-olds neither employed nor enrolled in school more than doubled from February to June of this year). But it’s not all doom and gloom. With four sisters on a spectrum from early teens to mid-twenties living under the same roof, my house has felt like something of a modern-day March household. Or perhaps we are the Bennet sisters, as our situation often reminds me of the brilliant reimagined Pride and Prejudice web series, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, in which present-day communications grad student Lizzie Bennet vlogs about her insufferable rich neighbor Darcy in between complaints about the everyday challenges of young adulthood and family dynamics (I highly recommend binging if you haven’t seen it yet).
It felt very natural living with my older sister again — we’ve been roommates for more of our lives than we’ve been apart. But between having very different sleep schedules and her needing the room for Zoom teaching her fourth-graders, the time came for us to part ways, and for me to make the long journey across the hallway and invade my brother’s old dwelling.
This might not seem like a big deal, but in my household, it was. Tears were involved. We’re a very tight-knit bunch, and this move marked the end of an era. While my brother hasn’t lived at home for more than a few weeks at a time since going to school out of state, his room has remained exactly as he left it back in 2014, when he left home for the first time. Same Star Wars wall art, same blue bedspread, same dried out Palm Sunday leaves, tacked to the wall behind a crucifix.
After the walls are all painted, I’m thinking about putting the crucifix back up. One shared item between my brother and me, in this space that we’ve both filled with our favorite things. Where we’ve pinned important papers to the wall. Where we’ve thrown our shoes under our beds.
Childhood bedrooms are strange things — they feel like the entire universe until they suddenly don’t. I've had two. The first was in our old house, which now has different people living in it. I shared with my older sister, Katherine, and then when my little sister Rachel was born, Katherine and I bunked our beds and Rachel moved in, lining her bed on the opposite wall. Then my mom got pregnant again, with another girl, Bridget. So, we moved (to the other side of town) when I was about 12.
In the new house, the girls split up: Katherine and Jen on one side of the house, Bridget and Rachel on the other. But, for Matthew, nothing really changed. His room at the new house was basically the same as his room at the old house — except with more space. A cut and paste of room decor, no shifting of roommates or compromised aesthetics.
And it’s more or less remained that way. Until a few weeks ago.
a room of one’s own (give a take a few hundred sisters)
Growing up, I’d always wondered what it would be like to have my own room. As the younger sister, my vote on wall color was vetoed by Katherine’s choice: ballet slipper pink. I despised pink — my favorite color was fire-truck red. Looking back, I understand why I lost that battle.
Other than our disagreement on the room’s aesthetic, however, Katherine and I didn’t have much roommate conflict. We generally got along, spending our days playing Polly Pocket fashion show and dancing to Shania Twain and the Dixie Chicks. I liked always having a playmate and confidant by my side. However, at night, when I would lie down in my bottom bunk, I would dream about growing up and having my own apartment someday, in a big city, where I would buy my own groceries to put in my own fridge and would sleep in my very own Queen-sized bed in my very own bedroom.
But, funnily enough, I’ve never had my own space, even when I went off to college. Freshman year, I lived in a dorm with a roommate in what was basically a glorified closet. Sophomore year, I lived at home for a semester before moving into my sorority house, where I shared a space with 1-2 roommates each semester (and many, many more housemates) and slept on a sleeping porch, also known as a ‘cold dorm,’ surrounded by other women, resembling the little orphan girls in Madeline.
Sleeping porches originated in the early 20th century. When outdoor sleeping on balconies became a health craze thought to help prevent diseases — part of the “better health movement” that emerged out the tuberculosis epidemic — architects adapted their design plans to meet demand. Modern sleeping porches were adapted to be their own floor of the house, no longer open to the outside, but still above the rest of the house. The higher altitude and cool air were believed to produce better air quality and circulation, and the location — isolated from the rest of the home — was seen as an escape from dust and bacteria that could enter the lungs (Source: Old House Journal, July/Aug 1995, Lynn Elliot, “Sleeping Porches,” p. 38). I was fascinated to learn this, especially in a year when I’m pretty much constantly thinking about disease and germs.
Of course, a sleeping porch’s function in a sorority house is a little different (I mean, packing dozens of girls who have been God knows where all night drinking jungle juice with God knows what in it in tiny attic to sleep is definitely not about disease prevention…one time my friend lost her fake eyelash in a bowl).
Because rooms are shared between up to four women — who are often running in and out, studying, screaming, etc. — sleeping porches provide a soundless space solely dedicated to slumber, creating something of an oasis. A catalyst for the perfect night’s rest.
However, the downside to the cold dorm is being literally surrounded by twenty or so girls, even in sleep, which can be irritating if you have personal space issues (like me). In a sorority house, you basically give up any semblance of privacy, which did drive me crazy sometimes. But mostly, I loved it, which is strange for me, a full-blown introvert, to admit.
I loved walking back from class and eating lunch at a long table full of girls in sweatshirt letters, talking over each other and scrambling in and out of the kitchen, bouncing with energy. I loved curling up in the TV room and watching the Twilight movies with my friends as people popped in and out, leaving for and returning from this or that frat party or exchange. It felt like living in a sitcom, a cozy world where we only spoke in punchlines and everything turned out alright in the end.
When I look back on my college experience, I tend to see it as a dichotomy between the bubble gum brightness of my sorority memories and the intellectual blossoming I experienced in my classes. My undergrad years opened up a whole new world of text and inquiry and theory. I read authors I’d never heard of, filling me with a sense of wonder that manifested into a hunger to absorb as many new ideas as I could. I remember my sorority house and the classroom as entirely separate entities — one of partying and glitter and laughter and one of paperback books and boundless curiousity. But if I challenge that notion, the two overlap much more than I give them credit for.
For starters, I was my sorority’s scholarship director. For me, bookish and shy, the role gave me a sense of purpose, a way to navigate my identity in a foreign environment where I wasn’t yet sure where I fit in. Additionally, through my position, I was given a front-row seat in which to see my sisters’ academic ambition, which inspired me to challenge myself more in my own studies. A definite Elle Woods-esque enlightenment fell over me—coinciding perfectly with the fact that I actually was in a Legally Blonde collegiate production, and yes I did play Kate the Scholarship Chair. Life imitates art and all that.
As scholarship chair, I was also in charge of maintaining our scholarship closet, which contained years worth of notes, textbooks, and study materials from alumni members who had come before. In digging through the scholarship closet, I became fascinated with the idea of how many girls had sat in the places I had, possibly in the same pair of letters, clutching a bundle of flashcards, wired on caffeine. I began to see the cards and pieces of binder paper as artifacts, reminders of how I am almost spiritually connected to each woman who had passed through these walls, each with their own stories, dreams, ambitions, journeys.
I was even more intimately acquainted with my mystical relationship with the past when Homecoming rolled along, and we opened our house to alumni to — quite literally — walk down memory lane. I volunteered to accompany alumni members through the house, eager to meet former members and hear their stories. One woman I met had lived in my sorority house in the late 1960s. As we passed each room, she shared a different memory attached to it. My favorite antidote was when she and her girlfriends got the new Beatles album, Sgt. Pepper’s, and played it backward on their record player, looking for clues that supported the “Paul is Dead” conspiracy theory. I was immediately reminded of a few nights before, in which two of my friends and I huddled together in one of the bedrooms to listen to the premiere of the new Harry Styles single, watching at .25 speed to catch the quick camera cuts and analyzing each scene as if the “Lights Up” video was the Da Vinci Code.
As we reached the end of the hallway and made our way to the stairwell, my new friend and I were just about to part ways when she suddenly pointed to a photo hanging on the wall, remarking, “Oh, that’s me!” She was in a photo on our bulletin board, in a white dress, young and beautiful with Brigitte Bardot hair, surrounded by smiling friends.
I’d passed by that photo so many times, running late to class. And here was the woman in the photo, standing right next to me.
Interestingly enough, the person who had the greatest role in helping me appreciate the deeper beauty of living in a sorority house was one of my English professors. I had invited her as my guest to “Scholarship Dinner,” where each member could invite a professor to a formal dinner to offer gratitude for the role they played in our academic journeys. I always loved Scholarship Dinner — it was a shattering of the false dichotomy I had created in my head, opening up our little world for one night to our favorite teachers and advisors.
The professor I invited was a poet who had (and has) a beautiful way of looking at the world. She’s the type to sigh after reading a particularly poignant line of prose, pausing to let the class sit with what they just heard. To my delighted surprise, she was absolutely thrilled to be invited over to our house for dinner. When she inquired about whether or not we slept on a sleeping porch, I was expecting one of the usual reactions: judgment, shock, humor, pity, or a mixture of any of those. But she simply said, “I think that’s beautiful,” seeing the porch through a feminist lens as a form of trust between women, protecting one another, safe from harm in a hidden location. A profound bond.
I’ll be honest — that reading never crossed my mind. In my head, the porch was just an annoying but necessary part of the deal of being in a sorority. But after hearing that poetic musing, I found myself romanticizing my sleeping arrangement every time I crawled into bed. Privacy was overrated. I was sharing a profound bond of sisterhood, even in slumber, damn it.
call me mary beton
In “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf famously wrote, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” This was a revolutionary concept at the time it was written, that a woman’s contribution to the literary canon must be understood in the context of the enormous disadvantage women had in creating art due to their circumstances.
Of course, Woolf is not talking simply about the necessity of having your own physical space, although this is important as well. She is also speaking to the space a woman is allowed to take up in society, in public discourse (which, naturally, is directly correlated to the amount of physical space she is allowed to occupy and create in). While writing a novel is an almost impossible task for anyone, Woolf argues, men face the cold indifference from the world, while women face material barriers.
However, the importance of having a physical space in order to work cannot be understated, especially as the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed our professional lives, ushering in a new “work from home” era. According to a Stanford University study, 42% of Americans now work in their home offices full-time.
Additionally, with schools shut down at every grade level, children have also made this transition, doing their school work under the same roof as their parents conduct work meetings. Naturally, hilarity and disaster often ensue, which has gifted us with viral videos such as “BBC man,” in which a strait-laced reporter struggles to maintain composure as his family makes an unexpected cameo in his Zoom interview.
Balancing parenthood and work has become a hot topic in our public discourse, leading to plethora of feminist analysis on the subject. As early as March 2020, Helen Lewis wrote an article for The Atlantic titled “The Coronavirus is a Disaster for Feminism,” in which she argued that with the economic downturn and unavailable childcare, women’s wages will undoubtedly take a larger hit than their male counterparts’. For Rolling Stone, EJ Dickinson wrote a piece called “Coronavirus is Killing the Working Mother,” in which she stresses that “you can’t have it all” mentalality does not apply equally to men and women, that women have historically taken up the majority of childcare responsibilities, even as they entered the workforce.
In Deb Perelman’s New York Times op-ed, “In the Covid-19 Economy, You Can Have a Kid or a Job. You Can’t Have Both,” she notes that while living under the current framework of trying to balance full-time parenting and childcare responsibilities is virtually impossible, she still speaks from “a position of significant privilege.” Low-income families are hit much harder, low-income women the most so, with many not afforded the luxury of working from home and leaving their jobs to watch their children.
In other words, two things plague women’s ability to produce work, creative or otherwise, in a pandemic: interruptions and financial strain. These contemporary women’s concerns echo those of Virginia Woolf, writing in 1929, “…to write a work of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty…Generally material circumstances are against it. Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down.” Woolf continues, musing on literature of the 19th century, “But for women, I thought, looking at the empty shelves, these difficulties were even more formidable. In the first place, to have a room of her own, let alone a quiet room or a sound-proof room, was out of the question, unless her parents were exceptionally rich or very noble…”
Material circumstances: the death of creativity.
A “hot take” that often appeared at the beginning of lockdown orders was that Shakespeare and Isaac Newton produced some of their greatest masterpieces in a pandemic, so, of course, we could, too!
This, as so many Twitter users have furiously pointed out, is the dumbest hot take ever for so many reasons, and I simply don’t have time to unpack all of it. But while I think some of the doomsday cries of setting back feminism a hundred years because of Zoom school lack much-needed nuance and intersectionalism (we can’t really discuss gender inequity in this pandemic without also addressing socioeconomic status and race) I think it is extremely important to point out that money and space are two things that are absolutely essential to any substantial productivity, creative or otherwise. In fact, these things are just essential, period.
We need to remind ourselves that while some have the privilege of seeing the pandemic as an opportunity to explore the depths of their imagination through art, others were forced to remain at their retail job despite cases surging uncontrollably, or were at home trying to work and parent and homeschool simultaneously, or suddenly became a full-time caretaker to a relative.
I love Taylor Swift, but while folklore exists in part because of her immense talent, it also exists (of course!) because of privilege, because of not having to stress about Congress not passing another stimulus check, because of having a cozy cabin to record music in instead of an eviction notice.
questions and answers
So here I am, reflecting on the significance of creating within four walls while creating within four walls.
I don’t think it’s any coincidence that my newsletter of long-form writing was only birthed when I finally had my own space to write it in (that is in no way comparing whatever I’m doing here to King Lear or folklore by the way, just so we’re clear). That’s an immense privilege, and when I start to get emo about how much the pandemic has taken on me, what a burden my loans are, and how scared I am about the future, I try to remember that.
Zora Neal Hurston said, “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” This year, for me, is both. I feel as though I’ve spent many years asking questions without working toward any answers. In some ways, I see this year as my opportunity to finally put in that work, which I believe is best done through writing. And rewriting, which develops even more questions. And how lucky am I to have a room to fill with all those questions?!
But first, I gotta get those last two walls painted.
Thank you for reading this absolute MAMMOTH of a newsletter. I remain so grateful to everyone who is following along on my journey to write and create and ask questions and attempt to answer them.
Have a lovely, lovely day and I will see you next week for more ramblings.
Take care,
<3 Jen