welcome home, stranger.

In a room there are many memories.  

Four walls, one door, three windows, one round bed.

Pink paint, movie posters, 

holes in the wall from a girl 

who thought she could shoot a bow and arrow properly. 

The room and the girl grew as one,

with cupcake drawings turning into

 Mockingjay pins turning into

a long, feathered,white Prom dress.

She left

and the room remained the same.

But she did not.

She was a stranger to this place

they told her to call 'home.'

So she changed it.

If there's one lesson I've learned from a year away at college, it is the value of allowing yourself to change, and grow. It was eye-opening for me to realize how much of the collected stuff that has piled up in my bedroom was no longer necessary. I've had a year full of adventures, new stories to tell, new people I've met, and those memories are much more valuable to me than all of the clothes, shoes, purses, you name it, that I left behind at home. 

I decided to move everything I owned in my room out into the hall, until I was left with a completely empty room. It was a blank slate, a new page, a clean canvas, any type of metaphor you'd like to picture. It was incredibly liberating, and after condemning all of my crap out into the hallway, I slowly began to bring back in only the items I thought were  truly important.

I ended up spending at least a WEEK in a room with only a bed, my book, and my laptop. 

It couldn't last forever (my poor dresser was shoved into our guest room) but my goodness, it was so free and peaceful.  

We often don't need as many collected things in our lives and in our rooms as we think.

It's been about a month since I got home for the summer, but I wanted to treat this project with care, and give it time. So I basically re-designed my room, and it isn't a tremendous transformation, but it was all of those little changes (hanging my photography around the room like my own personal art gallery, putting flowers in ball jars, no more clutter allowed) that make all the difference. 

cheers to playing interior decorator, but more importantly, feeling fresh about a new stage in life.

Marilyn