The Empty Rooms We Furnish

In the space between ambition and creation, we build worlds from nothing but doubt and possibility—furnishing empty rooms with pieces of ourselves.

An hour before dawn, I stare at a blank page—not the metaphorical kind writers often lament, but an actual Google Doc with its cursor blinking like a metronome counting the seconds of my creative inertia. The coffee beside me has gone cold, forgotten in the war between ambition and ability that wages silently in my head.

I've always found it peculiar how we romanticize creation. The tortured artist narrative, the stroke of midnight inspiration, the feverish typing of a story that practically writes itself. What horseshit. What beautiful, intoxicating horseshit.

Creating something feels more like renovating an empty room with furniture you've yet to build. And sometimes, the room isn't even there—you have to construct the walls first, wondering if they'll hold the weight of whatever you eventually place inside them. "Is this load-bearing?" you ask of a sentence, as if words were beams and paragraphs were floors.

I’d imagined that a grandparent would say that a house is made of walls, but …