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The Rooms Inside Me
A reflection on memory, identity, and the longing to feel alive.
I wrote this while exploring some feelings around memory, identity and emotional disconnection. Writing it was unexpectedly cathartic, and I wondered whether any of these experiences might resonate with others.
I’d love to hear your thoughts. ❤️
The Rooms Inside Me
I have lived so many different lives.
Sometimes I wonder where they have all gone. Where the people I used to be have disappeared to, and whether they are still somewhere inside me, waiting to be found.
I carry them all, I suppose. Every version of myself. Every life I’ve built, every person I’ve loved, every place I’ve called home. And yet, so much of it feels inaccessible to me now. As though there are rooms inside myself that have been locked for years, and I’ve forgotten where I left the keys.
I know those rooms exist. I know they must, because they made me who I am. But I cannot always remember what it felt like to live inside them.
Today, I ordered breakfast.
It was something ordinary. Something I used to share with someone I loved a long time ago, in another life. I hadn’t thought much about it when I ordered it. In fact, I’ve noticed that I often choose this same meal when I’m feeling particularly low.
But today, something happened.
For a moment, I felt it.
Not a memory exactly. Not an image or a particular moment in time. More like a familiar smell that suddenly transports you somewhere you had forgotten existed.
I felt the warmth of that life.
The richness of it.
And for one fleeting moment, I remembered what it was like to feel connected to my own existence.
Then came the grief.
Not because I wanted that life back. Not because I wanted to be that person again. But because I remembered how it felt to be alive in a way that I struggle to feel now.
And I realised how much I miss that feeling.
I have spent so many years learning how to survive inside my own mind. Learning to carry things that are difficult to explain, even to the people closest to me. Learning to be my own companion, my own advocate, my own source of reassurance.
There is a particular loneliness in living an experience that you cannot adequately describe.
In knowing that something is happening inside you, something profound and consuming, and having no way of making another person truly understand.
Eventually, you stop trying.
You accept the isolation as the price of being who you are.
But lately, something has changed.
The loneliness has become something more frightening.
Because somewhere along the way, I think I began losing my connection not only to other people, but to myself.
I move through my days. I work. I talk. I make decisions. I do the things that make up a life.
But sometimes it feels as though I am standing behind glass, watching myself exist.
I am there, but I cannot quite reach myself.
And perhaps the most frightening part is the thought that this might be all there is. That I might spend the rest of my life searching for a feeling of belonging, not just in the world, but within my own skin.
I don’t know exactly why I am this way.
There are diagnoses, explanations, pieces of a puzzle that have accumulated over the years. But none of them has ever quite explained what it feels like to be me.
And I am tired.
Tired of trying to explain something I barely understand myself. Tired of being my own champion every morning. Tired of carrying an invisible world that nobody else can see.
But today, for a little while, I found a way back.
I felt something I thought I had lost.
And perhaps that is why I am writing this.
Because I don’t want all these experiences to remain locked away inside me. I don’t want the richness of the lives I’ve lived, or the suffering I’ve endured, to disappear into places I can no longer reach.
I want to give them form.
I want to turn something invisible into something that can be seen. Something that can be held, understood, perhaps even recognised by someone who has never met me.
I want to make something beautiful from the things that have hurt me.
Not because the suffering needs to be justified.
But because I am tired of letting it be the only thing that speaks.
And perhaps, somewhere in the process of finding the words, I might begin to find myself again.
Perhaps the rooms inside me are not empty.
Perhaps they have simply been waiting for me to open the doors.
And perhaps I do not need to remember every life I have lived to know that they are all still part of me.
For now, I want to begin here.
With a feeling.
With a memory.
With the warmth of a breakfast from another lifetime.
And with the quiet hope that somewhere beneath all this disconnection, there is still a richness to being alive.
One that I might learn to feel again.
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