Some room to express my own view

HAVE you ever wondered whether your kitchen has ever dreamt of being a bedroom? What if, the day your house was first being furnished, your kitchen hoped against hope that you would choose it to hold your bed, your desk, your lamps, books, posters… and imagine it’s immense disappointment when it is instead filled with a fridge, an oven, and a microwave.

It feels like it’s been filled with the wrong things. And though, to you, it is functioning just like it should, what if your kitchen is miserable? It does what it knows it should, makes things easy for you. It doesn’t want to be a bother. But really, all your kitchen wants is to be a bedroom.

Looking at your kitchen right now, what are you thinking? Perhaps you are impressed by it’s acting skills. Maybe you are upset and are considering sleeping on your kitchen floor on Tuesday nights to make it feel better. Or you could simply be staring at the page in utter confusion as to why I am promoting awareness of room-identity.

But, what if the kitchen in question is, in fact, not a kitchen at all (nor a bedroom), but you? What if you are indeed feeling like you are filled with the wrong things, in the wrong place, with the wrong people, doing the wrong things? As a 16-year-old girl who really should be riding on the backs of dragons somewhere in Norway, I can tell you, that this is how I feel the vast majority of the time. It is a frighteningly claustrophobic feeling, being bound by the social protocol.

What must I do? Go to school, do homework, smile or frown in all of the right places, remember to drink plenty of water, go to family reunions or parties (though most of the people there have never acted very much like a family and barely know your first name), take up a sport to stay healthy, get outstanding grades. become a good person — shh. No. Stop.

I want to discover who I am and what I really love, I want to travel the world and see all of the beautiful sides to this Earth, I want to sit on a rooftop at four in the morning with my best friend and talk about the universe.

I would like the world to stop shoving their ideas down my throat and let me come up with my own ideas or beliefs or morals.

Because if you hadn’t filled your kitchen with kitchen things, it could have become what it wanted, instead of what you saw fit.

So I can tell you right here and now, that I am not a kitchen, I am a bedroom.

And I would ask you please to stop trying to push your kitchen furniture through the door, as I am chucking it right out the window.