I don’t remember when I learned about the rooms, but I always knew of their existence. It sounds contradictory, but I lived it. If you are an honest person, you know that we can live inside contradictions quite easily. The problem begins when we become aware of them.

We had rooms of music, literature, and art, a room of maternal nurturance and savory home made foods, the room of unspoken fears (the door open, fear falling outward, never enough space), the room of father-absent-yet loved (who is he?), the room of our mother’s pain (tread carefully when the door is ajar), rooms of guilt, of otherness, of loss, but most importantly the room filled with questions I could not ask (this one, locked firmly).

So yes, the rooms were always there and we inhabited them seamlessly through the staircases, hallways, and windows with which they were connected. But the locked ones, they had a force field surrounding them, they emitted a magnetic power, sometimes attracting, sometimes repelling me. And always inaccessible.

Perhaps you think these rooms represent a fractured identity, or the sides of an identity, like the sides of a prism. Yet a prism is whole, and an identity is already formed. I was neither. I was a child. Still forming. Still questioning, still grasping.

Do we become whole? Maybe it is that the child becomes the sun around which we orbit. It is the control tower emitting to us safety messages and traffic patterns (right, wrong, imprecise, no matter). Our challenge is to shift the constellation of our personalities from the orbital fears and needs of the child, to the clarity and perspective of an evolved adult.

This is my journey of evolution. It is, at least, my attempt to process it and share it. There is no end. There will only be a last page of the narrative I produce.