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 a home is made of stories. She'd brew tea strong enough to strip paint and tell tales of her childhood in a village I've never seen, weaving narratives so vivid I could smell the monsoon rain on hot earth. I wondered then, as I wonder now, how she made it seem so effortless—this act of turning memory into presence.

That's what we're all trying to do. Make something present that isn't quite there yet.

I've worked with clients who approach creation like they're ordering at a drive-thru—specific, immediate, and designed for consumption rather than contemplation. "I need a brand story that makes people feel something," they'd say, as if emotions could be summoned like an Uber. "But nothing too sad. Or controversial. Or expensive."

And I'd nod, taking notes, thinking: You cannot birth a universe with an assembly line mentality.

Because that's what creation is—a birth, painful and messy and sometimes requiring forceps to pull the damn thing out. You cannot sanitize, schedule, or make it palatable for stakeholders who prefer their inspiration to arrive in PowerPoint form.

I remember my first editorial job, with delusions of becoming the next Hunter S. Thompson, minus the substance abuse (spoiler alert: I managed half of that equation). My editor, a man whose eyebrows seemed perpetually raised in skepticism, handed back my virgin work with so much red ink it looked like it had been caught in a crime scene.

"This," he said, tapping a paragraph I had labored over for hours, "is you trying to sound like a writer instead of being one."

I wanted to argue and defend my baroque adjectives and meandering metaphors. Instead, I nodded and rewrote it, stripping away the pretense until all that remained was what I meant to say. It was terrifying—like standing naked in a crowded room—but it was also the first time my writing felt like it belonged to me rather than to some idealized version of a writer I thought I should be.

That's the thing about empty rooms—they echo with possibility but also with every insecurity you've ever harbored. What if I fill this space wrong? What if no one wants to sit in the chairs I've built? What if the whole structure collapses under the weight of public scrutiny?

I've spent years helping brands find their voice, which is a sophisticated way of saying I help companies pretend they're people with feelings and values instead of profit-driven entities. And yet, there's something almost transcendent about when the right words click into place and suddenly a product is no longer just a thing but a story someone wants to be part of.

Maybe that's why I keep returning to this blank page, this empty room. Despite the angst, self-doubt, and cold coffee, there's a peculiar magic in watching something emerge from nothing, in seeing words arrange themselves into thoughts that might matter to someone else.

Or maybe that's just the kind of pretentious bullshit you tell yourself at dawn when the words won't come.

I stretch, feeling the pop of vertebrae curled over a keyboard for too long. Outside, the sky lightens from black to navy to the uncertain blue of early morning. Soon, the world will wake up and demand things of me—emails to answer, meetings to attend, other people's stories to shape.

But for now, in this liminal space between night and day, there's just me and this room I'm trying to furnish one word at a time.

My coffee has gone cold, but I drink it anyway. It is bitter, like the taste of starting over, and sweet, like the promise of getting it right.

I place my fingers back on the keyboard and begin again. This time, I don't try to sound like a writer. I don't try to sound like anyone. I try to sound like me—whoever that is today, in this moment, in this room that was empty but is slowly, word by word, becoming something else.

Something that might, if I'm fortunate, echo in someone else's empty room and make them feel less alone.

Is this art? Is it commerce? Is it therapy? I don't know. Maybe it's all of these things or none of them. Maybe it doesn't matter as long as the walls and furniture support the people sitting in it.

The sun crests the horizon, painting my walls gold. Another day begins, and the room is no longer empty.