I read a blog entry the other day where they wrote about their teenage bedroom, and it got me to thinking about mine. The irony is, that as I'm typing this, I'm in bed in that very room - albeit an altered version of it. I've never felt very safe in the house I grew up in; if my parents ever went away then I either filled the house up with friends or I stayed elsewhere because I'd get so freaked out by being in it on my own. But my bedroom was different. I felt safe in my bedroom. Cocooned and supported in a world where I felt anything but. It was the space in which I could let my heart break and the tears fall instead of wearing the face mask of happiness that I presented to the world on a daily basis.
If you ever wanted to know who I was at 16 then all you needed to do was come into my room - it basically bared my soul. I was lucky in that the decor was mine for the picking, so I had pale yellow walls with dark blue radiator and woodwork (anyone who knows me in the non-cyber world will appreciate my love affair with painted radiators). Topped off with dark blue curtains with gold stars and a vaguely matching duvet set.
The walls were completely smothered, mostly in posters from Kerrang! of my most beloved musical heroes - Nirvana, Marilyn Manson, Three Colours Red, Placebo, Feeder, System Of A Down, Coal Chamber, Korn, Defftones, The Offspring, Metallica, Slipknot - you get the picture. A large chunk of one wall was taken up with a 9 foot poster of the front cover of Placebo's 'Without You I'm Nothing' which somehow I acquired from our much loved and much missed independent music shop in Eastleigh: Pinpoint Music. The stories of our trips to that shop can wait for another day... I was fascinated by Brian Molko and his androgyny and bisexuality, little did I know I'd later come out as bi and be specialising in counselling gender variance.
Overlapping the posters were scrawled out copies of poems, both mine and proper authors, which if you'd taken the time to read, would have painted a very sad picture of where my head was at during that time. It would hardly surprise you that right up there was Sylvia Plath, WB Yeats, Emily Dickinson and William Blake (the 'experience' poems, not the 'innocence' ones). Poetry was one of my less destructive releases, and I still use it as a cathartic process today. I found it so hard to tell people how I was feeling, that poetry was my way of painting my picture, and for that I used my words and others. I also found a comfort in having Lorelei next to me as I fell asleep, knowing that I wasn't alone in how screwed up my head was.
Pictures also festooned my walls. I love my friends. I know everyone says it, but I really really do love them so much, and they've been an amazing support to me throughout my life. So rather than shut all my photo's away, they were covering my walls with their patchwork print of smiles and laughter and happy memories.
Mementos were there in force also - gig tickets, a Ford badge nicked from a car from the first time I went to Reading Festival, a 'Time Team' Membership car sticker stuck backwards on the wall, a Welsh love-spoon my Grandad gave me which now hangs in my kitchen, a smashed CD (which, if memory serves, was a Spice Girls single I got in a lucky dip at Pinpoint Music).
Then we get to the ceiling... obviously there was a light. There was also stereo speakers, a string of fabric chickens, CD's on string, several loops of cow bells, a Barbie on a rope, a Christmas decoration I made in infants school and refused to take down, a giant pencil (!), a dream catcher, and a fabric The Offspring flag that looped from my ceiling to door frame. Perhaps that's why I felt safe there... anyone in my room would have been garroted long before they could do any harm or steel anything!
Remnants of my childhood remained too... some animal posters, a shelf of nicknack's from holidays and gifts from grandparents, cuddly toys that I wasn't ready to say goodbye to, all my 100 odd Sweet Valley High books, which were counter balanced by the Marilyn Manson autobiography and the Communist Manifesto. It's that unique snapshot in time of childhood, adolescence and adulthood all blurring in together and a mixed up soul trying to make sense of it all.
*picture to follow
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