Discovery Story

My parents didn’t want to know my gender before I was born, so I had a gender-neutral colored room. I hated having a yellow room and the Winnie the Pooh wallpaper around the top of my walls made it that much worse. My mom thought it was the cutest room and refused to let me change it “until I was older”. Finally, when I turned 10, I was able to pain my room however I wanted for my double-digit birthday.

Before my birthday I spent weeks looking at paint samples in the hardware store. I decided to narrow my search down by choosing my top 4 favorite colors. At the time, this felt like the most important decision in my life. I chose a pink, baby blue, green, and orange and was unable to get rid of any of these colors. So, I did the only option that made sense to 10 years old me, paint all four walls different colors.

My parents advised me against this decision, but once I had an idea in my head there was no going back. Reluctantly, they brought me to the hardware store and got 4 different half gallons of paint to create my masterpiece of a room.

I was so excited for my room to be painted the next day that I woke my dad up and got him out of bed by 6 am to start working. I was finally ready to have the grown-up room that I had wanted so badly.

After a week of painting, my dream bedroom was finally done. My parents blindfolded me and took it off awaiting my excited reaction. As soon I saw my room I was so disappointed. It looked like somewhere a clown would live. I pretended to love it, to make sure I didn’t hear “I told you so from my parents”.

For the next 8 years, I would live in this horrific room. I would try my best to get different posters and paintings to cover the walls, but nothing could hide the rainbow that threw up in my bedroom.

Around my 18th birthday, I went on a school trip to Washington D.C. during my senior year of high school. We left on a Wednesday afternoon and didn’t return until Sunday. I got home late that night and was exhausted from the ride. To my surprise, my room was painted a light purple color. When my parents had asked me earlier what color I would like to paint my room for my 18th birthday, I responded “something pretty but adult, you can choose”.

While this may seem like a story of a young girl that couldn’t decide on what color to paint my room and then deliberately didn’t listen to her parents and ended up with an awful colored room, to me it was much more. I think it shows how I developed as a person and how my decision-making process has changed. I am still very type A and stress over making decisions, but now I listen to other peoples advice and even let to people I trust to make decisions for me.