The walls of my childhood
room used to be red,
now they’re grey

Chris Hachmann

When I was a kid, the wallpaper in my room was green. Honestly, the whole room was green: I had a green bookshelf, a poorly painted green toy chest, green dado rails, and green striped wallpaper. I think it’s safe to say that I liked green a normal amount at the time; it was my favourite colour.

I mostly associate green with nature. Specifically, it reminds me of the park near my parents’ house, full of European plants, manicured grass and soft spring sunlight. To me green feels safe and calm, almost nostalgic.

When I was little, I had a hard time keeping all my emotions in check, which meant that every emotion I felt was HUGE. This made me a happy kid but also a troublesome one, especially at school. Most of my memories from junior school start off similar: sitting in class with a friend and a workbook open, being bored out of my mind. I remember once during a German class we were working on our Hansel and Gretel picture books, which I decided was uninspiring. Instead, I put my effort towards entertaining my friend and myself. I pulled out some Halo figures from my pocket, slid a few to my friend, and folded some paper to make makeshift ‘UNSC’ bases; we were ready for war, and I can imagine the lopsided smile that spread across my face. Within no time at all, I was sent down to the vice principal's office for ‘distracting others’ (this was a fairly common occurrence). I didn’t mind being in my vice principal’s office, but I was often angry when I left the classroom. However, I’d quickly burn through my emotional energy and return to my usual happy self.

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I can remember my eighth birthday party. We held it at home, and it was Star Wars themed. We had a character entertainer who was playing Obi-Wan, and he was ‘instructing us in the Jedi ways’, which essentially meant all my classmates ran around the house smacking each other with plastic lightsabers.

Naturally, this wasn’t everyone’s vibe, so I set up my room as a dedicated quiet space. I don’t remember who was in my room during the party, but I do remember sitting cross-legged on the floor and unwrapping a Lego Star Wars: The Clone Wars set, so we could have something quiet to do together. There was loads of screaming and yelling outside my room in the side yard as kids had their valiant lightsaber duels. But I didn't care much about not joining in. My main mission was simple: ‘ensure everyone has a good time’. In my room, we walked the little Anakin Skywalker minifigure along the dado rails, we dug through my green toy chest, and we tried to build the Lego set but kept distracting each other. At some point, their mum came in to take them home; we hadn't made much progress on the Lego, but they seemed happy and calm, and that was all that mattered to me.

My room was my safe haven. It had my toys, my books, and my bed; I felt secure in there. Nobody would yell at me for distracting people or scold me for not understanding something. My room simply existed for the important things, like sleeping and playing with my Sonic plushies. Despite how long my room was green, I don't have many clear memories, only memory fragments that are shrouded in a happy, dreamy mist.

The first time I had control over how my room looked, I was a teenager, and I chose to make it red.

In contrast to green, I think red is complicated as far as colours go. I associate red with a wider range of things such as blood, cuts, Shadow the Hedgehog, anger, power, pain, and on the other side of the spectrum, passion, and love.

My high school also had red as part of its uniform, so I was always surrounded by red. As a teenager, my emotions were still huge, but much like my room, they had changed from green to red. I was angry, almost constantly. I continued to chafe against the school; I got angry at teachers often. Sometimes because I felt picked on and sometimes because I felt my friends were getting picked on.

Pro tip for anyone still in high school: don’t get angry at teachers. It mostly leads to punishment without accomplishing anything besides annoying them.

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The most memorable punishment I received during my high school came straight from my vice principal: I was suspended. My vice principal had a sweaty bald head, and deep scowl lines that paired well with the smile that didn’t reach his eyes, or the ‘friendly’ vibe he brought to threatening me. Honestly, the encounter feels more like a dream than a memory now, but I still remember how angry I felt leaving his office. ‘I know you have a hard time staying calm, but just remember, we are here to help you,’ he said, his smile finally reaching his eyes. The encounter feels more like a dream than a memory now. I still remember how I felt after leaving his office and arriving home, surrounded by my red walls and filled with red emotions. I kicked my schoolbag and ripped pages out of my maths books, but not long after that, the red faded and the rest of my emotions went with it.

I changed schools, and with the change of schools came another change of my room. I tried really hard to shove all my emotions into a big colourful box that I could keep locked away in the corner, all I wanted was to feel nothing. 

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The walls in my childhood bedroom are grey now.

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I associate grey with conformism or nothingness; it’s blank and doesn’t have any personality to it. Grey has always felt like depression to me, like the feeling of giving up. 

I chose the grey walls because I felt my room was overstimulating, and I decided that I wanted an adult room. I also figured the new wallpaper would match my new grey carpet, grey curtains, grey bedsheets and white IKEA furniture.

I don’t think there has been another time in my life where I felt as isolated as I did when I first recoloured my room. Melbourne was the city with the longest covid lockdown in the world, and I changed to a new school right at the start of it.

My grey childhood bedroom was my padded cell. I would sit with my laptop for five hours a day pretending to listen to the tiny squares of my teachers on Zoom, and at the end of the school day, I would move from my desk to my bed and doom-watch She-Ra or RWBY. During this time, I didn’t have any knick-knacks or posters in my room, so it felt like a hospital room. I hated being in there, but if I left my room, I had to hear my dad who was also stuck at home, and so the teenage angst made it preferable. I don’t really have a lot of solid memories from the lockdowns, mostly flashes, probably due to a mixture of poor mental health, repetition and monotony. I remember watching my washing line spin outside my window; I remember sleeplessly listening to the rain, tracing shapes along my arms and staring at the massive scuff on my bedroom light. In 2021, during our next even longer batch of lockdowns, the grey became too much for me to deal with, so I caved and started pulling toys out of storage and bought posters and art prints as a last-ditch effort to add some amount of colour back into my room. At the time this felt defeating, like I was admitting I wasn’t ready for an ‘adult room’, but now I’m just happy I didn’t leave it blank forever. 

When I visited the NGV with some friends, one of the first questions I had for our tour guide was if they had their Mark Rothko painting out of storage, and sure enough, they did!

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When I finally walked into the room with Rothko at the NGV, I’d just spent an hour looking at a bunch of classical paintings of landscapes or ships or couples slow dancing. Walking into the room at NGV with my friends and seeing it hanging there, I felt a huge wave of relief, like I had finished a long quest. My friends stood looking at it with me but after another round of, ‘It’s just colours; I don’t get it’, they left.

It’s hard to describe what I was thinking about when I was looking at (Red) but it was overwhelming. It made me think about the late nights spent sitting in my grey room tracing along my arms with scissors, of listening to rain hitting the roof, and it made me feel alone again. (Red) made me think about different red and grey emotions.

Leaving the gallery, I didn’t intend to write about (Red), but I kept thinking about my friends’ reactions to it.

When I opened Substack and pasted in a photo of Great dancing pair by Erich Heckel (1923), I was trying to write something about the anxiety that romantic emotions gave me, but I couldn’t stop staring at the woman’s red dress and thinking about the dry scratchy paint strokes and oscillating, uneven coats of (Red). Of Rothko painting my feelings on a giant canvas.

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I don’t feel a lot of red emotions now.

I’m not sure if I know what romantic love feels like, and I don’t get angry like I used to.

But I feel Rothko’s (Red).

‘Doom’ is a word I’ve read a lot to describe Rothko’s art, but I don’t think it quite fits. Despairing? Isolating? Romantic? I don’t think any word quite fits.

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When my friend Abby first stepped into my childhood room, she didn’t fixate on all the grey that’s still in there. Instead, she noticed all the colours. Some of the main colours that Abby noticed were the red lipstick in my framed print of Korra and Asami, the red on my Shadow the Hedgehog poster, my green desk mat and cyan PC.

Despite the effort I’ve made to re-incorporate colour into my room, the grey still lingers. I feel like it will never quite be gone, but I think I’m okay with that.