A Room of My Own
A huge sigh of relief escaped from my lips as the chapter of five years of anxiety-inducing college education came to a close. It was a victorious day, filled with flowers, chocolates, a beautiful bottle of rosé, and wishes of congratulations, tinted with ironic pessimism from my loved ones. I honored my ancestors for blessing me with a life they never had. However, ahead lies the uncertainty of adulthood, yet I let it stay there while I set myself on my green couch and rest.
I have been waiting for this day to come for over a year now, after spending semesters of writing essays and papers on geopolitical conflicts and interests that further fueled my cynical outlook towards the world. I kept telling myself, “Once I am done with this, I can write to my heart’s content.”
However, the reality of job hunting presents itself in order to liberate myself from financial dependency on my father, and, in turn, liberate him from me. Yet, lately, I’ve been dreaming of spending my days on my red desk, with the windows open next to me, writing pages and pages of words I’ve conjured up to create meaningful stories and dialogues and prose. When I’m not at my desk, I see myself sitting with a guitar on my lap with beautiful melodies streaming out of my tongue like a string of drool on a good night’s rest.
I keep thinking of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and how much sacrifice needed for a woman to write (at that time). She wrote:
“Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time.”
The context of this quote is that there were socio-economic limitations for women to have creative independence up to the early half of the twentieth century, and few women managed to find success in writing literature due to such limitations. Although women’s poverty in modern society has decreased and more female writers have flourished in recent years, what bothers me (personally) is that I still need to have money to have such freedom. The freedom to just spend my days with a pen and a blank page. Seeing how human civilization has entered the late stage of capitalism, a decaying system that thrives in chaos and exploitation, I’d rather have a room of my own, completely undisturbed. For now, I can only dream.
