The Room, or Knowing When To Move On

In the summer of 2015, I made the biggest mistake of my life and applied for a Master’s degree. The issue was not in obtaining the degree; that was at least good for my sense of self-worth. No, the mistake was staying in a place that I should have left.

As my undergraduate years came to a close, I had put no thought into what career to pursue. Three wonderful years traipsing through York, its museums, snickelways, and bookshops, had come to an entirely predictable, yet somehow unexpected, end. Paralysed in a fit of passivity, I decided to stay put and applied for an MA in Archaeology of Buildings. Aside from delaying the need to make a decision, I justified that this was a step towards a career in academia. While not particularly profitable, this would at least provide social respectability and a shield from having to go out into the real world.

My undergraduate studies in the department had gone down well enough that my application encountered no resistance. However, I had applied late and had to find somewhere to live. E__ was my only friend who was both staying in York and who had not sorted their living arrangements. So after agreeing to share somewhere, we ran around York looking for a place to call home. There were slim-pickings: most were either too expensive or came with no furniture. Finally we were offered two beds in a house share. It was well situated, newly furnished, and the estate agent promised us that we would pay a set, reasonable, amount regardless of whether the other rooms were filled. We leapt at it.

There were four bedrooms (one downstairs, one to the right of the landing, and two to the left of the landing), a living room/dining room, with a kitchen just through that. I took the one immediately on the left of the landing and E__ took the one on the right. My room was not too cramped, central in the house, and had a window that looked over the street. I remember being optimistic about it.

We moved in three weeks later. It transpired that we had two other housemates, both guys. J__ was a similar age to us, while H__ was considerably older and from South America. On the first night, I suggested we go to the pub, have a drink, and get to know each other. So we went, had a drink, and got to know each other for about an hour before heading back. It was the only time we all sat down together.

We were not a sociable house. Neither H__ nor J__ seemed interested in anything more than exchanging pleasantries in the kitchen. Although E__ and I would occasionally eat together, we had different workloads and work patterns; he was often squirreled away working in his room as I ended up spending more and more time in my room.

The room met my basic student requirements: a cupboard, desk, and bookshelf along the left wall, with a bed in the far right corner and a chest of drawers in the near right corner. The walls were bare and would remain so; the tenancy had stated that nothing could go on the walls. In previous rooms, I had covered just about every inch with flags, film posters, and even signs from abandoned factories. Here there was nothing but white. The ceiling was white, the blinds were white, the walls were white. Presumably it was to make the room light and uplifting. I came to think of it as purgatory.

I realised that I hated the room within the first month. At first, I was distracted by my course and seeing my friends who were still in York for one reason or another. But as that first month went on, it was clear the magic was gone. I had stayed on out of a fear of confronting the real world and a desire to stay in the stasis-like cocoon of student life forever, but this was no solution to a problem that is not meant to be shied away from.

The course was neither more advanced than my undergraduate nor more likely to resolve what I wanted to do with my life. My drive to do the work required withered, but was replaced with nothing. I started to realise how much faith I had placed in this course giving me direction. I had come to see the course as hollow, but, in my mind, the whole idea of a career in academia had now been exposed as hollow as well. With this, I stood aghast, staring into an empty future as a cavernous void opened within my soul.

Meanwhile I found being amongst friends who had stayed felt like being in a holiday resort out of season. We still hung out, went to the pub, played football, but something had changed. That vital spark was gone. Of course, they were not responsible for this; without them, I would have plunged to far greater depths than I did. Nonetheless, I felt a sense of loss permeating through every increasingly stilted conversation.

Even York lost its charm. There were no more hidden gems to discover — everything became routine. Student events lost their appeal and there was little prospect of getting involved in societies I’d steadfastly ignored for the past three years. I felt like the main character in Quadrophenia when he discovers the Mods he idolised leading regular boring daily lives. Unlike him, I was not spurred to action, but to further inaction and despair.

I spent hours in my room agonising over the mistake I had made. I was restless, constantly moving around the room, like the most pathetic exhibit at the zoo, trapped in a cage of my own making. My inaction infuriated me, but it was the fury of an impotent. I would claw at my hair, screaming noiselessly into the void. The room was stiflingly hot (H__ insisted on setting the thermostat above 25 degrees which the rest of us meekly accepted) and I often lay in bed caked in sweat cursing myself.

The room had begun to embody all that I hated about myself, why I had let myself get in this situation, why I was doing nothing to remedy it. Part of this was a result of my projection, but there was something else. The room developed into a presence. Always watching, always there. I could see it in the window as I approached the house, feel it in the darkness as I climbed the stairs, before revealing it in all its hideous glory as I opened the door. The presence probed away at my hidden insecurities and weaknesses, dragging them out, plastering them on every wall. The sight made me sick and I would close my eyes praying that they would be gone when I opened them again.

I drank and smoked more heavily in that year than ever before or since. Getting black-out drunk at clubs and bars I hated, spending the next day lying in bed while a dull fog thudded around my mind, waiting for the house to be quiet before, like a rat, I would scurry out to secure food before anyone could apprehend me, all under the room’s ever-judging eye. I felt ashamed to exist. It left me unable to leave the room of my own volition, waiting on an invitation from outside. When such an invitation came, I would go hard, relishing the freedom and, lo, the cycle would start anew.

The room was crushing me. Increasingly I smoked at a friend’s (S__) house around the corner. I needed release from myself and the presence I had created. I would message S__ at late hours, desperate for permission to leave the prison that I was building around myself.

Inevitably my work suffered. I missed deadlines, half-arsed essays, and read little. When talking to lecturers about it, there was little to say. The work had not been done. Yet I became increasingly aware of the psychological imperative to complete the course. Either I completed the degree or the room would consume my future.

I hate who and what I was in that room: selfish, passive, self-destructive. Despite this, I draw strength knowing that that version of me survived tearing myself apart in the purgatorial hellscape of that room. For all the weaknesses that the room exposed in me, it also uncovered a deep resilience.

Looking at myself now, I still see all of those traits. Some are more hidden than others, but they are a part of me. I will never truly be free from them and that is OK. We all have our weaknesses and always will. We also have our strengths. To be who we need to be, we must acknowledge and accept both.

The room exposed me, but I outlasted it. The lease ran out a month before the deadline for my dissertation, so I stayed at a friend’s house while they were away for the summer. It was run-down, with bare splintered floorboards and mould in the bedrooms, but somehow it felt lighter. I was happy there.

In the afterglow of handing in my dissertation, I thought about carrying on in York, in academia, in archaeology. The last month had reminded me what I enjoyed about that world. Besides, I had made little progress on what else I could do for a career, so why not? Fortunately, however, the room had taught its lesson well.

I knew it was time to move on.