The Blank Room

Neutral thinking is often bias wearing silence

The Blank Room is not emptiness; it is the illusion of neutrality. It is the internal space where I believed I was thinking freely, while repeatedly arriving at the same conclusions and calling it clarity.

I returned to this room often. It felt calm. Controlled. Familiar. Inside it, I could slow everything down, examine thoughts carefully, and convince myself that nothing important was being missed. The absence of friction felt like intelligence. The lack of disturbance felt like mastery.

The belief that sustained the room was simple: I had enough information. If I thought carefully, objectively, and long enough, I could manage any outcome. I trusted my ability to analyze more than my willingness to be disrupted. I mistook preparation for movement.

Objectivity became a shield. I defended it fiercely. Any idea that introduced discomfort was labeled premature, emotional, or irrelevant. Silence inside the room did not mean there was nothing to consider — it meant something could not enter. Instead of questioning relevance, I defended thoroughness. Instead of allowing uncertainty, I protected coherence.

I told myself I was being reasonable. Measured. Disciplined. In reality, I was rehearsing the same beliefs under different language. I returned to the room not to discover something new, but to confirm what I already believed — and I called that thinking.

What finally broke was not a conclusion, but an assumption: that asking the right questions guaranteed the right conclusions. The room did not keep me safe because it was empty — it kept me contained because I never allowed anything that could disprove me to enter.

The identity that survived there depended on appearing rational while remaining unchanged. I set goals that were reasonable enough to justify staying where I was, but small enough to avoid confronting what I actually aspired to become.

The room was never neutral.

It was curated.