When I can’t sleep, instead of counting sheep, I count each piece of paraphernalia I’ve stuck up on my wall, or every impractical gift I’ve collected to display on my bookshelf. The four walls of my bedroom essentially place me inside a giant, cube-shaped, time capsule. I lie on my bed facing the ceiling, surrounded by iterations of my own self-mythology: who I was when I received a trinket, who I was when I decided to display it, and who I will be when I decide to remove or place something new alongside it.
Almost the entirety of my room was redecorated during lockdown, when I was on the cusp of turning seventeen, and going absolutely insane holed up in what felt like an empty, ever-shrinking enclosure someone had abandoned me in. Obviously, every item had a story and held meaning in and of itself, but their meaning also changed when consciously chosen to be displayed semi-publicly. The question was not “Do I want this poster on my wall?” but instead “what kind of person do I look like with a crumpled Sydney train map sticker blu-tacked up next to my bed?”.
And now, as I’m no longer seventeen nor trapped in my room, the meaning behind these things change again when I consider whether to leave them up or let them go. Some items are resigned to their fate as a representation of a time I do not wish to memorialise, my quarantine-era blackout poetry —the gaudy, self-aggrandising type done by an angsty teenage girl— carefully peeled off the walls to make way for W.B Yeats and his less adolescent musings. Others stand the test of time, with the train map still dutifully occupying prime real estate. With the benefit of hindsight, swathes of my room feel like a love letter to lockdown, a fossilised distillation of my teenage self in its most unfiltered state. The end result is a pastiche of my past and present selves, collated together in a way that echoes the cumulative nature of self-mythologising.
A distillation of one’s present self is much trickier to articulate through room decor. The mythology behind the object is in a state of flux, as you decide what each new addition represents and how that shapes the items that come before it. My friend Sahana displays a collection of fancy, relatively expensive, perfumes. The collection initially began with 18th birthday gifts, a marker of the transition towards adulthood. No more Victoria’s Secret body sprays. It’s time for Replica by Maison Margiela. As the collection grows, it becomes less of a transitory symbol and more of a representation of embracing adulthood: she now has disposable income and more refined taste, as well as the time and capacity to personally indulge in luxuries. It’s nice to see these little developments play out in spaces as mundane as a wooden vanity.
These need not always be consumerist indulgences though. As I get older and have more agency, I’m able to adopt trinkets which embody more active elements of self-mythology. The Honi Soit covers on my wall, and on many other peoples, are emblems of robust participation in a decades-old tradition, a marker of collegiate identity and scathing progressive sentiments [exhibit B].
My room also increasingly speaks to my friendships and relationships; the vast majority of my trinkets have been gifts or explicitly remind me of someone. Throughout the years I have memorialised: newspaper butterflies and tiny little illustrated stickers of road signs made for me, concert stubs and wristbands, plane tickets, paint-by-numbers, legos, a hair ribbon from the last day of term, shopping bags, broken vinyls, and the first autonomous Honi I ever edited [exhibit A].
Walls can also speak to what you have not done, as much as they can speak to what you have. My friend Oscar has their acceptance letter from Brown University pinned up, despite declining to enrol: “It represents a path not taken at a time in my life where I learned that escaping the people and places that know me best is an often illusory promise”. The way people interpret the trajectory of their lives through moments like these speaks to the creation of a larger self-narrative charted, and then displayed, by items which come to characterise personal epiphanies.
The peak of transitioning to adulthood is usually moving out, which often comes with the desire to adapt self-mythology. This has been anecdotally explained to me as a process that takes many forms: letting go of old sentimental ornaments, leaving wall space for new memories, changing your approach to collecting and displaying trinkets. Because of this, early-twenty-something bedrooms tend to be inherently anachronistic, representing a chaotic mix of various temporal realities. My friend Upasana has recently moved out of her childhood home, and explains that “I mainly haven’t decorated because I don’t know what I like as a person…in high school all my interests were so vivid and created big feelings… but now I don’t even know what I want my space to be like”. Instead of reverse-engineering this, and figuring out what kind of person they are based on the space they occupy —like I did during lockdown— Upasana wants the room to “organically come up as a result of life… to reflect what I care about now”.
I haven’t moved out yet. I’ve stretched my four-walled canvas out to infinity with memories and feelings — it’s become a museum of my life. When I inevitably have to peel the blu-tack off, I hope I can give all my trinkets —and by extension, myself— new meaning. In the meantime, if these walls could talk, they would never shut up.