Letter from the editor
The Room to Grow website is no longer live, but its archive is available for free download. Thank you & goodbye.
Room to Grow was a public journal, a collective memoir, a monument to memory, a place to share, a body, my body, my memory, our thoughts, your autobiography. It was a Website/Instagram account that went live in July 2019. Throughout its active period, I shared the writings of 50+ creatives. As of today, the website is no longer live, but you can download a PDF copy of all the work included. The writing below is my Letter from the editor contextualising the project, explaining my decision to archive it & giving updates on my life and the lives of the contributors. In doing so, I share my thoughts on growing up in the 2000/2010s, being a girl online, the feminist recommendation to share your story and so much more.
Hello there!
If you’re downloading this PDF, I assume you already have some preexisting knowledge of what Room to Grow is about. Maybe you lived in London in 2019 and heard about the project through the grapevine at Goldsmiths. Maybe you were based in Massachusetts and a Boston University student showed you the way to the website. Maybe you were born and raised in Rio de Janeiro and met me long before I called myself Ella. Maybe you were in Melbourne and one of the Pure Nowhere girls pointed you in our direction. And maybe you weren’t in any of those places, but the Instagram algorithm somehow led you to me all those years ago.
Just in case you have never heard of the project before, here’s the gist of it. Room to Grow was a Website/Instagram account that went live in July 2019. Throughout its active period, I shared the writings of 50+ creatives. In May 2020, I announced that I needed to take a step back from the project and would come back soon – but I never did. I believe it is important to place works in context, especially when one is doing the work of archiving. I would like to acknowledge the specific time and space in which this project came to be. All creatives included in Room to Grow were born between 1994 and 2003. As a generation, we may not have grown up with smartphones permanently attached to our hands, but this is true of our teenage years and entry into adulthood. We were preschoolers when Time Magazine named ‘You’ as the person of the year as an ode to the rise of user-generated content. We weren’t around when Carrie Bradshaw’s fictional digital diary reshaped the imaginaries of our mothers–although it was radical before us, the blend of the real and the invented in a public forum was so widespread by the time we came around that it was taken entirely for granted. In the 1980s, the internet went from being a protocol to a place. In the 1990s and 2000s, that place grew massively. In the 2010s, it became a different kind of place altogether. While our parents were raised in the one-way street of the big screen, something about the division between public and private split in their lifetime as they went from television to laptop to phone. We are still trying to figure out what it meant to be 12 in 2012, to be given our first smartphone under the supervision of parents who were just as clueless about that world as we were. We were teenagers when conversations about whether or not it is possible to separate art from the artist became mainstream; we’ve been investigating the porousness between self and work since we started creating content. We came of age in the world of daily vlogging, of oversaturated Instagram selfies. We watched and eagerly joined in as social media transformed from a blank slate to a space co-created by users who gave it conversational form.
Like everyone else involved in this project, I looked at the online spaces available to me and had a desire for something different, for something more. I wanted a space where I could showcase my “authentic” self, unbounded by the restrictive nature of the medium. I aimed to use the internet as a way to form genuine connections and share sincere stories about my experiences, limited as they were at seventeen. These were the impulses that created Room to Grow.
I do not recognise myself as a woman and I haven’t identified as such at any point in my adult life, choosing instead to use the label of non-binary as it more closely resembles the experience of being in my body. And yet, I was for so long a girl online. Girlhood led me to the world of journaling and blogging, a world which has for so long been coded as female. It is not only through this act that gender has come into play with my experience of the internet. There was a significant gender gap in the adoption of the World Wide Web after its arrival in 1994, with most of its users being men. And yet, studies show that women have been far more prolific online communicators, sending and receiving personal emails long before it became mainstream to do so. Women were also early adopters of social media, with 75% of American women utilising Instagram in 2012 compared to 63% of men. Going back even further, women have always been at the interface of communication technology: from telephonists and telegraph operators to ‘computers’, the early coders whose key-tapping associations with secretarial work tagged the profession female.
There is also something to be said about the feminized labour of care work, and how it took shape in this project. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, it felt like the world was ending and we were all in so much pain. I saw it every day when I opened the submissions page on the Room to Grow website and, eventually, I could not look at it anymore. This project has always been a communal effort but, as the person assembling the work, I retained a lot of control in constructing the narrative. I was content sourcing and publishing other people’s feelings, but then suddenly and with no explanation the act of doing so became deeply uncomfortable to me. As Zoe Todd puts it, Personal paradigm shifts have a way of sneaking up on you. I no longer believed that the internet was an adequate place to articulate our emotions. I pulled away.
The work done here has never been done for profit; we have never been paid for it but we paid for it in time. More than that, we paid for it in data. The fully commercialized internet is built on an understanding of identity in which each of our characteristics is one that advertisers would be incentivized to track. This organizing principle of the internet cheapens all types of identity, reducing our lives in all their strangeness to a series of boxes to check and levers to pull before serving a targeted advertisement. I am still online—I am still paying for the space I occupy—but I am trying to be more mindful of the facets of myself I publicise, and I no longer feel equipped to facilitate the exposure of other people’s private lives.
All posts included here as Anonymous had a name and a face attached to them on initial publication. Writers who have asked me to make their work anonymous have done so for one of three reasons. A few expressed concern over their writing’s visibility to potential employers as they have now graduated from university and are trying to find a place in the workforce. Others said they thought their candidness about intimate aspects of their lives placed an unfair burden on family and friends. Some said that their feelings on the topics discussed have changed, and they would like to move on from this part of their life. I am highlighting this because I think it speaks to a wider shift in perspective both on my side and on the side of the contributors. With the passing years, we have found ourselves asking questions: Whose story is yours to tell? What are the parameters of your “I,” and are you speaking within those bounds? If your truth is your truth and my truth is my truth, then whose truth is truth?
The feminist recommendation to tell your story, whether publicly or privately, can provide relief and transformation, but so much of the nuance of personal experience is lost in attempts of articulating a single coherent narrative. When it comes to writing, each word is a binary gate. The composition of the self through narrative emerges from active choice. As Walsh puts it, What I am working towards is self and what I am working with is self, which is simultaneously material and end and process. The screen produces the personal only in seeming opposition to itself. As we have grown and changed, we have found ourselves less entrenched in the work of sharing our lives. I would still rather be an expert on myself than Cicero, but I am much more hesitant to share those parts of myself online without giving it time and context and more careful consideration. Stories of identity are never static, monolithic, or politically innocent, and the ever-changing nature of my own conceptions of ‘self’ make it hard to determine what to share in a public forum.
I am not writing any of this to dismiss the work included here. It is my work after all, and I want you to know it meant the world to me. I would not have spent the past couple of days compiling this document if I did not believe it was powerful and meaningful. Over the years, I have received an overwhelming amount of messages from friends and strangers expressing how the pieces on Room to Grow positively impacted their mental health and relationships. The singular can function as a gateway to the multiple; in telling our stories, we told the stories of so many others. In the absence of institutionalized documentation or in opposition to official histories, memory becomes a valuable historical resource, and ephemeral and personal collections of objects stand alongside the documents of the dominant culture in order to offer alternative modes of knowledge. From the mundane stories about friendship shared in Room 1 to the complex accounts of neurodivergence and suicidality shared on Room 3 to the sex advice on Room 4, Room to Grow’s focus on both everyday life and life-altering events paints a valuable picture of a moment in time. In this archive, our teenage years endure and we find new meaning as we look back.
I have lost touch with a lot of people who wrote for this project. While many of the writers were strangers, others were friends, and I have seen the transformation in their lives since. Many of the people who wrote about struggling with their mental health have found healthier coping mechanisms, and nearly everyone who wrote about their lives in a particular country has now moved somewhere else. Some of the relationships written about with so much passion here have ended badly, and friendships have faded away. In this way, this PDF is a representation of the enduring ephemerality of all online content. As the first book I ever loved makes clear: Things change. And friends leave. Life doesn’t stop for anybody.
The “death” of one’s identity–an identity one has long defined oneself as, and has reperformed day after day, in the Butlerian sense of an identity “instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” raises interesting questions around autotheoretical practice and the instability of the “auto.” I keep going back to a conversation I had years ago with an artist I deeply admire. When asked why they removed most of their earlier work from Instagram, they said: “you’ve got to let things die otherwise you’re not making art you’re just selling real estate.” To disappear, you have to have appeared. The screen is perfect for this; disappearing is part of the act. I am always aware of the possibility my screens might ‘die’, might cease to demonstrate anything: my laptop its own memento mori, or maybe mine. Walsh writes that if you google DOSM (dead on social media), you mostly get articles on ‘dead’ sites, online death being a refusal to update. In that sense, I’ve been dead since May 2020, and if not the totality of “I” then at least the part of me responsible for the creation of this project. If I ran into the girl who created Room to Grow I would find it hard to recognise her. Things are different, that much is clear. If you compare this with my earlier writing, which is included all over the latter part of this document, I think that change is evident.
I do not think it is a coincidence that I and many others who have done projects like Room to Grow are also zine makers. On the zine-making culture of the 90s, Kaitlyn Tiffany writes: They were not for profit (in fact they lost money), they were collaborative (participatory, transformative), and they were decidedly amateur. They weren’t always political, but they were serious about wasting time. They labored unproductively or counterproductively on something that most people considered emphatically dumb. “Creating a zine can define work—and the sense of time that accompanies it—in a way that is markedly different from that which is common in daily labor,” the historian and activist Stephen Duncombe observed in his 1997 book Notes from Underground. Four days ago, I woke up and decided to start compiling this document. I haven’t stopped since, spending all my waking hours trying to make this happen. For years now, I have been telling people I was going to archive the project, but something has always stopped me. I have been trying to figure out what it is about this time of my life that has guided me to assembling this now, if only so I can explain it to you here. Perhaps I feel like I am once again at a crossroads, and I am looking for meaning in collating the works of others. Perhaps, like the zine makers I surround myself with, I am just serious about wasting time.
Moving work from one medium to another decontextualises and destabilises. The transformation of this project from a Website/Instagram account into a PDF assumes many losses, but it also invites new perspectives and interpretations. Either way, it is lovely to see you again. Don’t be a stranger.
(There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt. The bold passages throughout this letter are direct quotations or re-articulations of writing by Ann Cvetkovich, Ben Tarnoff, Joanna Walsh, Kaitlyn Tiffany, Lauren Fournier, Lisa Duggan, Michel de Montaigne and Stephen Chbosky. The quote at the start of this parenthesis is by Audre Lorde.)