I do not have many photos showcasing the layout and decorative choices of my childhood bedroom, and this is something I very much regret. Within a teen’s bedroom exists an entire universe that is separate from family and friends and comprised entirely of elements of self: old diaries, ill-fitting lingerie purchased while virgins, trophies boasting baby successes, posters of bands we’d be ashamed to admit now that we used to enjoy. It is a holy alcove where one can simultaneously eschew childhood and cling to it fiercely: it is the place we feel most comfortable crying for nostalgia’s sake, over lost battles or a sudden flare up of heart ache.
As a tween I took to decorating my bedroom with the seriousness of a professional interior designer, though my choices hinged less on trends in furniture styles and more on what I saw on TV. When I was 12 and we moved to Philadelphia, one of the first purchases for my new bedroom was a set of cloud curtains from Bed, Bath and Beyond simply because Lizzie McGuire had a pair. I had outgrown my room in our old house–its pink walls had become permanently ruined by the blue goo that held up my NSYNC and Leonardo DiCaprio posters–and I saw our move to Philadelphia as a chance to reinvent myself and turn my room into the way I envisioned a “grown-up” room’s looking. It took less than a month for the entire thing to be covered in posters, though this time they were for movies I loved (Moulin Rouge, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and ‘cooler’ bands I’d moved on to (I had upwards of 10 Dave Matthews Band posters, of course).
Every couple of years, usually on a rainy Sunday evening, I would be gripped with the undeniable desire to redecorate my room. Hours of cutting out photos from magazines followed. Each time I performed this ritual, the images I taped up inevitably changed, but the spirit of my room–that embarrassingly earnest teenage spirit–remained intact. I plastered my walls with fashion ads and photos of friends, ticket stubs and inspiring lyrics I’d typed up in Word Art. As a teen, you have so little control over the world around you: your parents dictate your home life, your teachers dictate your school life. In my room I had complete control–it was the only space in my life where I had any agency. I was giddy with power, and entirely guilty of overdecorating. My poorly-hung magazine cutouts belied my wonky sense of self: my walls were just as confused as I was.
I was lucky that my parents let me decorate as I pleased. During my senior year of high school I hung a drawing of a guy smoking a bowl right above my bed, smack in the middle of a collage of other images. My parents must have seen it–it was right there–but they never said a thing. I had put it there to test them, to see just how much I could get away with as I inched ever-closer to college. Looking back, the image was from an article in The Atlantic about college campuses with the highest drug rate–even my attempts at rebellion were impossibly dorky.
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My room had a window with roof access, and in my later high school years I’d sneak a bottle of wine and a pack of cigarettes up there and listen to my iPod–sad, slow Sufjan Stevens songs, usually–and watch the tops of the trees bend and twist. My room had a bed that was too low to the ground because my Dad put it together wrong and, though he promised to fix it, never did. My room had two huge bookshelves packed with Caroline B. Cooney novels and a Stephen Dunn quote scrawled on the wall: “The millennium, my dear, is sure to disappoint us. I think I’ll keep on describing things to ensure that they really happened.”
My room was a quiet retreat from my parents’ divorce. My room was a place for nervous high school boys to kiss my neck when no one was home. My room was a place to hide half-empty Smirnoff Green Apple bottles and attempt bold eyeliner designs and stay up late chatting on the landline. When I discovered there was a phone jack in my room, and that I could plug the family laptop in and get online using one of those 500 hours of free AOL CDs someone would hand you at Best Buy, my room also became a place to write on my Livejournal and gossip and have my first introduction to Internet porn (via literotica Usenet groups).
A lot of ideas and hopes and pieces of self were born and dispersed in my childhood bedroom. Soon, my parents will begin to clean it out to prepare for a potential move. They will find things that might charm them: bad poetry from 8th grade and sweet old photos. They will find things that might horrify them: crumpled, folded notes from mean boys who grew into meaner men, condom wrappers, hurtful diary entries. They will separate and categorize everything, throw away old clothes with holes in them and ripped posters. But they will have no idea what everything means to me–why I want to keep that ticket stub instead of another, how much sentimental weight a particular scrap of paper holds. I’ve kept those things for all these years so that I’d never forget any of the many iterations of myself, however fleeting or trite or desperate they were. I want to remember what it felt like to be 13 and 17 and 21. I never want to forget how to be me.
This post would be totally musically complemented by the Best Coast song “In My Room” (hence the title).
Being “gripped with the undeniable desire to redecorate” explains how bad you were with scissors. I remember everything looking hasty.
Still, so many great memories in that room!
oh my goodness. mini jess is so adorable. of course, you would probably have been horrified to be called that at the time.
had twilight been around, you would likely have had this: http://www.etsy.com/listing/28682772/edward-cullen-life-size-twilight