What a Room Allows

How Virginia Woolf helped me notice the life I was already living

I read Virginia Woolf’s novels and her famous 1929 lecture, A Room of One’s Own, at the University of Cambridge during my master’s from 2021 to 2023. At the time, I did not realise how deeply her words would follow me into life beyond the classroom. At first, it was simply a part of my curriculum, something I had to study for the exams and pass the course. But gradually, as a writer, it began to permeate my daily existence. Woolf writes about a woman who needs a place of her own to write. By the end of 2023, I realized I was no longer just reading Woolf; I was living her idea of a room of one’s own.

Living this idea did not mean factually copying or replicating Woolf. It meant making room for my writing in my own way. For me, having a room of my own means having a space to think freely and let ordinary life enter my writing. It is in that space that I begin to notice the small details of my everyday life more closely, details that often find their way into my essays. My essays often begin with small, everyday moments, in quiet times when I’m reflecting on my day or laughing at something ordinary. Sometimes they also begin in the quieter feelings of life: missing my parents after marriage, the sound of my bicycle, or the hum of the induction stove while cooking. These moments become part of my writing only when I sit down with them in my everyday journal.

I don’t believe a writer needs a perfect or fancy room. Sometimes my room is my couch, or the dining table, a kitchen shelf, or sometimes my bed. What I need is mental space. A pause where I can explore a thought and remain inside it for a while. A quiet stretch of time to let my mind wander until a story takes shape. When the essay is written, I like to read it back slowly to relive it, and I feel that is when I know the moment has been lived fully.

The Sound of Home

There was a time in the Netherlands when I missed my parents deeply. I missed the sound of my mother cooking in the kitchen in the evenings. I missed the way my father would return from work and enter the house saying, "Hello, guys." Then, almost immediately, he would ask what was for dinner. I remember my mother smiling and telling him, in her firm tone, to freshen up first. Dinner would only be served once everyone was seated at the table together. As a child, I never thought these ordinary moments would mean so much to me later.

When I finish writing, I like to read it back slowly in my own room. After marriage, those memories began to return differently. One evening in particular felt especially heavy, and I found myself missing home more than usual. I called my father, and he was at home. Then I called my mother and watched her move around the kitchen through the phone. For a few minutes, I recreated that familiar scene from a distance and lived inside it again. After the call ended, I wrote about it from my kitchen shelf. Writing made the feeling of missing my parents a little lighter. It helped me feel closer to them, and also to myself. By the end of it, that feeling had quietly turned into the story of that day.

Similarly, I gave my brain a pause and thought about what it needs, instead of emotionally crying.

Care in Motion

Another afternoon, from the window of my house, I watched a woman preparing her bicycle with her two young daughters, hardly four and five years old. It was a normal bicycle, with one child in the front seat and the other in a seat behind her. She adjusted one daughter carefully, fastened the helmet on the child seated in front, and then turned to the second child behind her seat and did the same. Only when everything was secure did she begin to cycle. The scene lasted barely a minute, but it stayed with me. In that brief moment, I saw how strength can exist inside routine, in doing what needs to be done with care and without complaint. I wrote about the scene later because I did not want to lose what I had seen in it.

What Remains/Conclusion

And this is what a room of my own has slowly come to mean in my life. It is the place where I return to moments that have already passed but are not yet finished within me. The evening of missing my parents and the brief sight of the woman cycling with her two daughters were both small, ordinary moments. Yet once I wrote about them, they became more than passing scenes/feelings. Writing allowed me to stay with them a little longer and understand what they were holding. In one, I was sitting with memory, distance, and the feeling of home. In the other, I noticed how much care and strength can exist in an ordinary part of the day. That is what my room allows me to do. It gives me a quiet pause in which life does not slip away too quickly. Perhaps that is also what writing from everyday life can offer to everyone: not a lesson, but a pause in which something ordinary can be seen, felt, and understood a little more deeply before life moves on. A room of one’s own is, for me, not just a physical place. It is a mental pause: a space to reflect, think, rethink, and write things down. This is how Woolf’s idea has made sense to me over time.