"There is no gate, lock, or latch that you can put on the freedom of my mind."
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
Reading A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf, my mind went not to rooms in their literal sense, but to the invisible architecture of space: to whom it is given, to whom it is rationed, and to whom it is silently taught to feel gratitude for every corner left to it.
Ulf's rooms are not just places to write. They are places where thought is allowed to finish forming without interference. The rooms I think of are of a different nature. I have been in workplaces where space was treated as a privilege. Someone would speak and the room would expand. Someone else would speak and the room would shrink around them, their sentences would be interrupted and others would speak as if they were not listening.
This text is not a reflection on women in the workplace. It is for anyone the majority decides to declare an outsider.
The truth is, some of us enter the workplace carrying with us a history of being told we take up “too much space.” So we learn to shrink and speak in edited sentences. We become the architects of our own packing, long before anyone asks us to.
Ulfi wrote about rooms as spaces of possibility, as places where the mind could unfold without judgment or interruption. But as I read the book in 2025, my mind went back a few years earlier, to a room of a very different kind, to that room where certain people were constantly invited in, while the “other,” the “stranger,” was cruelly left out.
Some organizations have rooms that are not on the building's floor plan. I call them "Tribal Chambers." They are the spaces where the tables are located around which decisions are made long before they are announced, often with a cup of coffee in hand, often amidst laughter, always with those who are members of the tribe.
And then, there are those dark rooms or corners of the corridor that are reserved only for the stranger.
Ulf’s argument that women need money and a separate room to write literature strangely becomes a metaphor for everything that happens to any person who enters a system as “the other,” as “the stranger.” You feel it immediately. The sloppy choreography of exclusion. The way the doors of conversation close without touching a single hinge. The way space is divided: ample for some, rationed for others.
Some of us are invited to the room where coffee cups are filled and alliances are built, where real conversations take place before the formal meeting begins. Others are escorted to the glass-walled room, that room that appears transparent but functions like a guillotine, where the message “no outsiders allowed” is delivered in the presence of those who have already decided in the “Chamber of Knights” that you do not belong.
So, over time, you realize that rooms are not just physical spaces. They are emotional ecosystems that determine who enjoys the luxury of speaking freely and who must weigh every word. Who is allowed to expand and who must fold smaller and smaller until they almost fade away.
A room of one's own, in the sense that Ulfi gives it, is that space where the self remains intact, where you are never in danger of being dismantled. It offers the idea that even when denied entry, context, or belonging, your mind remains sovereign. It is an inner room where no crowd can enter, no glass wall can make you vulnerable, and no exclusion can erase you.
That inner room takes time to fortify. Especially after you've been left out of the places where connections are made. Especially after you've only been invited into the rooms where you're expected to be learning and performing. Especially after you realize that some colleagues don't see you as an equal, but as the one who breaks the group's identity.
But there is always one room that the knights cannot close. It is the room they build themselves. The room that Ulfi believed every woman deserves, just because she exists. The room that I believe we all deserve, just because we exist. This is the room worth defending, especially when all the other knights are ordered to push you towards the exit door.
That room is not a luxury. It is the foundation of dignity.
