every choice you make is a room you'll have to live in

This essay has been inspired by our recent podcast episode, listen on spotify:

There is a building in southern Spain that is the perfect example of how all of our multifaceted sides converge in one human being. The Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba was first a Roman temple, a Visigoth church, an Islamic mosque, finally a Catholic cathedral. Centuries of history layered on top of each other, simply coexisting in the geometry of an unusual architecture. Standing there, it feels spontaneous to ask “if this was possible then, with all of that history, all of that difference, all of that weight, why does it feel so much harder now? To hold different things together inside one structure without one of them prevailing?”.

It may be due to a variety of reasons, layered differently depending on your perspective. From the outside, it can feel like the world has sped up: we have access to far more knowledge than ever before, and that knowledge keeps expanding, which makes it almost impossible to stay “caught up.” That pressure easily turns into anxiety and a constant sense of being behind; eventually, into the quiet disappointment of realizing how brief a life is compared to everything you could possibly learn or become. From the inside, though, the struggle can be more intimate and more painful. It can come from comparison: to great authors, painters, scientists, to the ideal version of mastery you carry in your head (especially if you have great taste). And the closer you look, the more you see the gaps, the things you haven’t built yet, instead of the many pieces you already contain.

You are also a building made of different rooms, you’re made of parts added over time, wings you built in a hurry, some doors you haven’t opened in years (and you’d rather forget over time), and there’s nothing wrong with it. The cathedral itself did not choose to become four things at once, it was instead built upon, slowly, by different hands that needed it to mean something new according to their own necessities and desires (and context). It would be fair and safe to say that the only thing that has remained the same is the foundation, despite the weight added or removed over time.

That is probably the only thing worth protecting in the end: the core that stays still while everything else gets renovated as many times as you need. And remember, no matter how often you invite someone into your palace, they will probably never see every room (let alone the previous versions). Even the people who catch a glimpse of a few are not seeing what is actually there. They are seeing what their brain assembles from the signals you give off, which is something else entirely. Still, those same visitors may leave things behind, sometimes decorating a room, sometimes damaging it. It is up to you to decide what boundaries you want for your own palace.

In the end, seeing is never truly passive, the eye is a remarkable instrument, more adaptive and more precise and more efficient than any camera ever manufactured, and yet the eye alone sees nothing. What you experience as vision is constructed entirely by the brain, which takes raw electrical signals from the retina and builds a coherent world out of them. Change the brain and you change what is seen, even if nothing in front of you has moved. Which means perception is not a recording, it is a constant interpretation of whatever you have in front of you.

Two people admiring the same building are in a very real sense standing in front of two different buildings, each one assembled in the back of their own mind.

This has a clear implication for how you think about being understood: you cannot change how someone sees you without first accounting for how they see everything else, which is a map they drew long before they ever met you, colored by experiences and moments and small electrical signals you had no part in. Their version of your palace is inevitably a partial one, filtered through all the other palaces they have known, and their own.

So the only thing you can truly tend to is what you choose to show and explain; what will always be felt is the foundation. It is not built in grand gestures, it is built through your values, through what you hold as crucial, and through the way you pursue those values every day, no matter how small the movement. Consistency in fragments compounds into meaningful output over time, it’s well known now.

You start with the foundation: what do you actually believe, underneath all the noise? Not what you have been told to believe, not what the people around you seem to reward, but the thing that stays true when you take away the approval and the performance and the version of yourself you present in rooms where you feel like you have to earn your place.

What stays when you have to trust your gut?

Finding your values shouldn’t be a dramatic process, but it can be painfully slow. You pay attention to what makes you feel like yourself and what makes you feel like a costume. You notice which rooms in the palace feel lived in, and which ones you only enter when someone else is watching. Over time, if you are honest enough, a shape starts to emerge: a structure that repeats itself across contexts.

But values, by themselves, are still just a blueprint. They don’t become a palace until you translate them into something physical: choices, routines, and boundaries.

Building the palace means a few specific things.

First: you turn values into habits. I know, I know… we say this all the time, to the point it already is background noise, but it’s still tremendously important. Because if a belief never touches your calendar, your hands, your repetitions, it stays up in the air without ever becoming tangible.

If your foundation is “I care about truth,” then the wall you build might look like reading widely even when it doesn’t immediately pay off, or writing even when it’s imperfect. If your foundation is “I care about beauty,” then you make a daily room for it: you sketch, you curate your inputs, you go to the museum, you walk without headphones. The point isn’t the aesthetic of the habit itself, it’s being able to maintain a promise to yourself. A palace collapses if the foundation is only something you say.

Second: you decide which rooms are private. Some rooms exist to be shown, like the ones where you host, perform, and translate yourself for others. Those rooms matter: they’re where you meet people, where you exchange meaning, where you build bridges, where you translate your thoughts. But if every room is made for visitors, the palace stops being yours. Part of growing up is learning that you’re allowed to keep doors closed. Not everything needs to be legible, and not everything needs to become content.

Third: you learn how to renovate without betraying the foundation. This is, maybe, the most important part. Because growth is not only addition, it’s mostly demolition, rewiring, repainting, throwing out old furniture that once kept you safe. Renovation is what happens when you outgrow a version of yourself, and yes, it can feel like grief.

But changing the room doesn’t mean you’re disrespecting the person who built it: back then, you needed different things to survive. Those habits were protective and they made sense in that season. You don’t have to burn the old blueprint to build a new wing. You can fold it and put it away, like some moms do with the clothes kids have outgrown: not because they’ll wear them again, but because it’s comforting to remember they did.

Then comes the most difficult part: detaching from what other people see when they look at your building. This is difficult not because their opinions are so powerful, but because you already know how perception works: you know they are assembling you from their own history, their own filters, their own unfinished rooms. You cannot build a stable foundation on someone else’s interpretation of your architecture, you’ll have to trust yourself (with some external inputs here and there, of course). That’s when you return to your own voice. You learn to hear it without the noise, which takes practice and probably some silence and definitely patience with yourself. And once you can hear it clearly, even if only for a moment you build from there. One room at a time. One decision at a time. One small act repeated until it becomes structural.

That is your palace: yours, not as an illusion, but as a place you can live in, a place that you can nurture and be nurtured.

Hi, I’m Cesca! And The Modern Renaissance is the project that I love the most. I founded it last August and it has been living rent free in my head ever since :) happy to have you here!

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