Living in Room 101. Ministry of Love.

I live in the Room 101. 

Room 101 exists. It is not a concept. It is not a theory. It’s not merely imagination of George Orwell. It is real. It is real because I made it real. It is no coincidence, in Oslo, I lived in the apartment 101. When I arrived in Reading, I stayed in room 101.

Room 101 is real. I have built it, brick by brick, over years; decades maybe. I don’t know when it started. Maybe it was always there, at least a foundation, a shadow in the background, waiting for me to notice it. And when I did, I became trapped inside. It is a room with no darkness. So, nothing is left for imagination. Everything inside it is real, and you can’t ignore. At least, it looks real. There are no doors. No windows. Just walls, closing in. Walls, that breathe. Alive.

I am Jack. Jack in the Overlook Hotel. Trapped. Isolated. I pace the hallways, retrace my steps, carve messages into the walls with my fingernails, hoping someone will read them. But there is no one to read them. There is only me. And the Room. And the suitcase in the corner.

The suitcase. It rests there like it has always been there. It has my name on it. It is mine. It follows me wherever I go, even here. Especially here. I don’t open it. I don’t need to. I know what’s inside. Fear, regret, silence, self-doubt. Anxiety packed neatly in folds, ready to spill out at any moment. I pretend it’s not there, but it hums. A low vibration. A reminder. Some days it’s loud.

I encountered it, in the mist, in the silence, on the Stonehenge hike. No distractions. No music. Just me and my thoughts. And that was a mistake. That was when Room 101 got bigger. That was when it stretched, when it grew, when I realized I wasn’t walking alone. My thoughts walked beside me. They whispered. They mocked. They played tricks. Like hallucinations.

“You think you are running? You are just running in circles.”

“Where do you think this ends?”

“There is no end.”

On long runs, I listen to George Orwell a lot. I mean, his audiobooks. I appreciate his work, the way he saw through everything, stripped it down to its bones. 1984 is not just fiction. It is a mirror. I am Winston Smith. On trial in 101. The one being broken down, reduced to my weakest self, made to confess everything I never wanted to say. But I am also O’Brien. I brought myself here. I built this room. I set the trap. I made the rules. And I am also Big Brother. Watching, judging, deciding what is real and what is not.

As I was hiking to the Stonehenge, the mist thickened. I couldn’t see. My light was useless, bouncing off the fog, blinding me instead of guiding me. I took a wrong step. I always do. My foot sank into the mud, and I was stuck. Just for a moment, but it was enough. Enough to feel panic grip my chest. Enough to feel Room 101 pulling me back inside.

I walked and walked and walked, but I was still there. It didn’t matter how far I went, how many miles I put between me and the starting point. Room 101 traveled with me. Because it wasn’t out there. It was in here. In my mind.

At Linkenholt, I sat on a damp bench under a skeletal tree well past midnight, scrolling through my Garmin, looking for a way out of the darkness. There was no one. No sounds, no lights except the occasional distant glimmer of someone’s driveway as I passed their house. Everything was still. Frozen. And I was alone with the weight of everything I had ever feared.

The farms I passed were silent, cloaked in mist that wrapped around me like a second skin. I adjusted my headlamp, trying to cut through the haze, but it only scattered the light, making the unknown even more impenetrable. I may as well have been blindfolded. The road twisted and turned, and I followed, not knowing if I was heading forward or if I had already been here before. That’s precisely what I feel right now, as I type.

I built this place. Carefully. Deliberately. I filled it with everything I fear. Everything I hate about myself. Every belief I carry like a curse. The fear of being seen. The fear of being forgotten. The fear that if someone reached out a hand, I wouldn’t know what to do with it. The fear that I would burn the bridge before they could cross it. The fear that I was never meant to be understood.

And the worst one. The one that whispers the loudest. What if I am nothing at all?

There are no doors in Room 101. No way out. But there is sound. There is silence. And silence is louder than anything. It echoes in my head, rattles my bones, scrapes at my skin. It strips everything down to the rawest version of myself, and I do not like what I see. I do not like what is left.

The Overlook Hotel had doors. It had escape routes. It had snow and ghosts and whispers, but it had exits. Room 101 doesn’t.

Maybe I made it that way. Maybe I didn’t want a way out. Maybe I wanted to make sure I stayed, because if I left, then what? If I left, I would have to find out what’s on the other side. I would have to figure out if there is anything beyond my suffering. And if there isn’t? Then what?

The suitcase stays in the corner, waiting. Waiting for me to pick it up. Waiting for me to unzip it, to pull everything out, to face it, to lay it all out on the floor and deal with it. But I won’t. Because what if I open it and find that it is empty? That everything I feared, everything that kept me trapped, everything that weighed me down… was nothing at all?

And if it was nothing, then what the hell have I been running from? What have I been carrying? What have I been fighting against?

The mist was heavy that night. It wrapped around me, swallowed me whole. I thought if I walked long enough, far enough, I would leave Room 101 behind. But I carried it with me, step after step, mile after mile. It was in the fog, in the dark, in the silence, in the ground beneath my feet.

Maybe that’s the worst part of it all. The realization that the Room 101 is not separate from me. It is me. It exists because I exist. It breathes because I breathe. And the suitcase is not just in the corner. It is strapped to my back, woven into my skin, part of me.

And I don’t know if I can ever put it down.