The Toughest Doors to Unlock
On Power and Agency
I don't know where I picked this quote from. My mind tells me that it was Abed Nadir from Community, but having looked through most of his dialogues, I couldn't find this one. Maybe it's because I don't remember the words correctly, but over the months I have repeatedly summarized the sentiment of this in all sorts of ways. It goes like:
Maybe the toughest doors to unlock are the ones that have no keys...
Honestly, it took me a little while to grasp this one. It's one of those statements that I have reinterpreted time and and time again, and each time I am left with a sense of puzzlement and intrigue, content and confusion. So here is me engaging in this dialogue yet again, because it has been on my mind off-lately.
When I look back at my life (I know 23 years aren't that much but still), something that stands out is my affection for rooms, more specifically a room of my own. For the first 10 years, I did not have a room to myself. I had to share my space with my parents. This also meant that anyone could access my personal space. I could not lock the door, and even if I did manage to close the door, I could not lock it from inside. The inability to lock myself from within meant that I could be locked from outside. This also happens to be a very popular parenting trick. And so, I often found myself getting locked inside rooms, whose doors I could not unlock. The only way out was waiting for someone to free me from there. As a child I believed that the toughest doors to unlock were the ones that were locked from outside. Ones which had a lock with a key that somebody had control over. And that somebody was never me.
I was 11 when I was given an entire room to myself. My excitement could not be contained within those four walls. I felt a certain kind of freedom being inside that room. And I realized that freedom came from realizing that I had the power to lock and unlock the door from inside. And so I did that. Time and time again. Whenever I was sad, angry, annoyed, or I did not feel like speaking to anyone, and be by myself, I would just come inside my room and lock the door from inside. Simple acts of power. And so every room that I subsequently entered was a room that I could lock and unlock from within. With of course a brief exception when I was staying in a overly crowded boys hostel, where privacy is treated like a joke, much like everything else.
The power to lock and unlock the door from within meant that I could stay inside for as long as I wanted. Now, over time, maybe this ability or power became a little implicit. I chose to stay inside for longer periods, or kept coming back to my room, and lock it from within, more and more often. Soon, my room became a sort of comfort zone. Not just the room in my home, but all the rooms that I rented over the years. I still remember how I would quickly come back to my hostel room after classes, instead of socializing. Not just that, anything that didn't sit well with me was a good enough reason to lock myself within. Somewhere in the process of escaping discomfort, I got comfortable with the escape.
What I realized is that when you get too comfortable with a sense of familiarity, anything remotely unfamiliar brings a sense of discomfort. Even if that something unfamiliar has a sense of goodness to it. I would always prefer to be inside this room, both literally and metaphorically. So much so that I started to believe that being in this room is my only option. It's the only way to go about things. Much later, I found another explanation for this behaviour. When the world around me felt so unstable, and unsafe, my room was probably the only place that provided a morsel of safety and control. When I found my surrounding extremely chaotic and as a result felt extremely helpless, the only thing that was in my control was staying inside my room. At least, here I felt somewhat protected once I had locked the door from inside. It was easy to shut myself off from things that felt threatening. This made sense. The idea of comfort zone which I visualized through the imagery of a room.
Over the course of time, talking to different people about their comfort zones, listening to their stories, watching them describe their comfort zone, their room, in details, what it meant to them, helped me understand this space better. Even though we have a perfectly reasonable explanation to stay inside, i.e., our safety, I wonder if we forget a few things in the process. We are locked inside a room that has no key. A room which is not locked from the outside, but rather from the inside. Nobody pushed us or locked us inside. Nobody is coming to rescue us. We chose to remain inside. We may have made that choice due to whatever factors, factors that were in our control, factors that weren't in our control. But it's a choice we made. And the thing about choices is, that they are endless.
Does this mean that staying inside the room is the only choice. Or, was it the only choice during a specific period of time in your life. A choice that helped you survive during that time. But are we willing to step outside and see what the world looks like now. The loud noises of chaos are no more audible. You hear a silence. Is this the calm before the storm or the serenity of autumn, as the leaves prepare to reincarnate themselves? You wouldn't know unless you step outside.
Maybe the toughest doors to unlock are the ones that have no keys. Doors that aren't locked from the outside but from within.
Hello! This took me sometime to write. I am still slowly recovering from the loss of past few months. Getting back on my feet, as they say. It's also the winter season, making the act of getting up itself quite hard. The thought behind this newsletter existed only as a quote for the longest. So, took me some time to put it into words, and I am really glad that I did. I am also realizing that the year is ending. Good opportunity to look back at the year and reflect. But I'll leave that for the next newsletter, which will be next year.
I am also super proud of myself. This is the longest I have stuck to an initiative. I didn't give up. I am grateful to each and everyone of you who reads this whenever they get the time to. I know it's extremely hard to find the time to read such long pieces which is why I appreciate your efforts more and more.
I will be back with more stories and thoughts to share. In the meanwhile I would love to hear from you. What do you think about AakashVaani? What's something that you liked reading? How do you feel about the year 2022? Until next time, Happy New Year!
When Life Gives You Melon
Choose Water over Choly 🍉
Aakash xx