What is a Room?

Or, Junkie: A Brief Reprise

Aug 06, 2025

Everything I am about to tell you is true. That does not mean it really happened.

It was some indefinite time in the afternoon that I finally began to understand where I was. The sun had just broken free of its clouded veil, and in doing so had turned the large sash window to my right into a riot of yellow and green. To me it was as if the light were somewhere else, trapped behind the glass. The only way in which the reality of that moment made itself apparent to me was in my body. I felt the warmth of the rough, sisal carpet of my studio flat under my feet. My shoulders dropped. How long had I been here? Even now I have no idea. I don’t remember the day, the month… even the year. Clearly it was summer, but from behind that window all I felt were faint emanations. The world was out there, but this place I had entered of my own free will had taken hold of me. I could leave any time I wanted, if only I wanted to.

Before we ever get around to lying to others we first lie to ourselves. If we’re practiced then we don’t even know we’re doing it. Everything was fine, I had just been working a bit too hard. Sure, I didn’t have anything to show for it, but isn’t that always how it is? It all comes together in the end. And yes, of course I had been spending some time online – how could I not? I needed to keep in touch with all my contacts. These relationships don’t maintain themselves. And I needed to know what was going on in my industry, and in the world. What was the thing everyone was talking about right now? I’d better know. How embarrassing would it be to show up at the next party and not know what was going on? When was that again?

I gradually moved towards the window. A large timber sash – its height running from my mid-thigh to almost touching the tall Victorian ceiling – it was the only source of natural light for the entire flat, but it was ample. Outside it there was a small, flat roof that topped the bay window in the flat below. I had often wondered whether it would take my weight. Stepping out onto it would be easy, if it weren’t for the nearly three-floor drop to the sunken back garden below. Besides, what was out there for me? My life was in here. I looked down at the garden, now in full flower. Jointly shaded by a large oak and a pine, just enough sunlight reached it for the green to give way to explosions of yellow, pink and white. It was beautiful, but frivolous. Gardens were for children and pensioners… I had important things to do.

It did not take long for me to melt back into the rhythm of that place. Information flowed into my mind in a near-endless stream of red, green and blue. My only respite from the Endless Conversation was streaming untold hours of TV shows. “Research”, I called it. I was, after all, going to write one myself one day. And while the paradise outside my window lay there neglected, the room itself began to change. I could no longer make out the subtle beauty of the carpentry or the delicate plasterwork adorning the walls and ceilings. Objects that had once held great promise – a selection of rare books, a guitar, an old 35mm film camera – became invisible, now mere relics of abandoned projects and pastimes. Shadows gathered in forgotten corners and I was drawn to occupy ever-smaller parts of the room. A chair, a desk, a couch. These became all I could cling to as everything else faded away. The room became everything, and everything was a collapsing space adrift in endless time.

The strange thing about self-internment is how rational it seems at the time. Outside of those four walls the world was slow and plodding, filled with disappointments and, at times, dangerous. Some time before all this I had been going to a gym regularly in Woolwich. For my return journey I was in the habit of walking out of the area a little, heading up Wellington Street and catching the bus somewhere along there, perhaps near the Royal Artillery barracks, or maybe just before. It depended how I felt. One day I caught the bus near the top of the road, I came back to the room to hear a soldier had been murdered there less than an hour after I’d left. His name was Lee Rigby; you’ve probably heard of him. There was a surrealness to that, the sense that history was happening around me but without me.

That feeling never really went away. The whole world was available to me through a screen, and I could see as much of it as I wanted as quickly as I was able to click a mouse button. Why take risks? Why navigate a world that feels like wading through setting concrete when here I am in complete control? The uncertainty of the world became a problem to be solved, and the solution was to retreat inwards. Armed with information, the world could become predictable… couldn’t it?

The window had a large, floral blind that, while not completely opaque, did a good job of darkening the room. I’m ashamed to say that on many occasions I drew it, not wanting the sun to ruin my view of the TV. Those fictional worlds I frequented had become my only escape from the room, and I often found the tension between the need for escape and the guilt for being unproductive almost unbearable. I will say, despite it all, that perhaps one of the few saving graces of that time was just how good the TV was. It seems so long ago that we had that.

One of the shows I consumed voraciously in that time was Mad Men. It was so good I didn’t even feel guilty about it. Every series was like a great American novel in its own right, and at times it cast a stark light on my own situation. One moment in particular cut right to the core of where I was: when I realised that the philosophies of two characters, Don Draper and Bert Cooper, had irreconcilably diverged, and the reason was how each of them related to the concept of a room itself. Bert, an old-school ad man and aspiring Randian Übermensch, believes that “a man is whatever room he is in.” But for Don, “when a man walks into a room, he brings his whole life with him.” Either the man is moulded by the room, or he brings himself to it and makes it what it is.

I pondered this for some time. Who was right? Was I under the control of some force outside myself, or did I bring that thing here with me? Neither thought was very comforting. But the conclusion I eventually reached was even stranger still: neither of these philosophies seemed to capture the totality of what I was experiencing. Both seemed right and wrong simultaneously. The more time I spent in the room, the less I felt distinct from it. It was as if neither I nor the room were the “primary” thing that made the other what it was, and it became impossible to know where one ended and the other began. The ultimate, inscrutable truth at the bottom of it all was that the room was me: its darkening form a perfect reflection of my inner world. And the longer I stayed there, the darker it got.

The sun was shining again. This time I resisted the urge to draw the blind… to go inward. Instead, something caught my eye. For the first time in a long time I had noticed something there on my desk and a flash of interest danced across my mind. I picked it up and looked it over – the old Pentax Super-A was dusty, but the shot counter and the lid of a cardboard film box slid into the thumb rest indicated it was loaded and ready to go. There were no excuses left. I picked it up, slung the strap over my head, and walked out the door.

Heading downstairs took only a moment, but that moment lingered. One of the many paradoxes contained within the room was that time there simultaneously stood still and raced forward at an unbelievable speed. But as I turned the corner of my building and walked down the steps to the garden, time readjusted. The camera’s weight was a reassuring anchor, and as I stepped onto the lawn and lowered down on one knee, I looked through its glass, firing off a few shots – a handful of moments captured forever in acetate. Out here, everything flowed… everything was new and evanescent and full of silent wonder. I sat down on the grass and allowed the feeling to settle in the depths of me. I was out. For this short time, at least, I was in the world again.

I have often thought back to that time and the seeming insanity of what I had gleaned from it. Soon after, a then little-known psychology professor from Canada became popular online discussing similar ideas, which was some comfort. But the truth was that something in my foundations had been nudged out of place. I wasn’t what I thought I was. I wasn’t just an object, or a free agent drifting separate from the world around me. I was part of something after all… what you might call the unfolding of the world. Acknowledging that indistinctness of myself from my surroundings proved to be the necessary catalyst for change. Leaving the room was a choice to change myself, to become something different.

That is not to say I never returned. While I may have moved out of that flat many years ago, I have found myself in that same room many times. The problem with personal revelation is that it never quite sticks; it requires constant reaffirmation. But every time I have gone back I have stayed for a little less time, never allowing it to get quite so small. And it serves as a useful reminder that being in the world, for all its pain and tragedy, is preferable to its opposite. Because the room is always there, waiting for me to choose to, or, through carelessness, re-enter it.