A room I forgot to claim

A woman never belongs to any place; from birth till death, nothing is truly hers. This profound realisation dawned upon me just today. It is such an agonising irony because I believed I was never a part and parcel of internalised misogyny. I thought I was bold by taking my own decisions; a strong feminist always demanding equality. But I never realised how deeply socio-femininity and misogyny were ingrained in my thought process, even when I believed I was an equal.

Equality was something I demanded outside—in workplaces, conversations, and arguments. Inside the home, I practised the same old patterns of subconscious adoption of sexist ideologies. I accepted inequality as normal, perhaps even natural. I called it a choice, but it was a habit. I called it freedom, but it was an adjustment. I carried the weight of feminist slogans, yet inside the house, I thought compromise was strength, sacrifice was love, and silence was dignity. I believed choosing the smaller piece of chicken or giving up my corner for someone else was proof of my independence, when in truth it was proof of how conditioned I was. The fact that I, too, was complying with societal conditioning came as a surprise—and through a simple, inane, and trivial matter. I realised that I have never had a room or a corner of my own. A space only mine, where I could listen to loud music or soft ghazals; where I could write, contemplate, laze, and simply be me.

If I trace my memories back, I never thought that my father’s home was not mine. I was not into such prejudicial beliefs. When you chose to get married, you lovingly built a home with your spouse, and I was obsessed with mine. I loved playing house. Growing up, I shared a room with my brother, as was a norm in middle-class families back in the 1980s. Much younger than me and a nuisance, he would invade my private space. Later, marriage made me happily share everything with the man I chose to live with for the rest of my life.

While men’s workstations and children’s rooms were unquestioned necessities, my work was done in the dining space. I chose this, thinking it would help me manage household crises while I worked. No one had ever forced decisions on me—I was always my own woman. However, what I missed was that in my middle-class upbringing, I had been conditioned to value respectability, shaped by patriarchal norms, over freedom. And I had complied.

This is how internalised misogyny works—it doesn’t shout, it whispers. It tells you that you are free while you quietly adjust your life around everyone else’s needs. It convinces you that being the one who manages, sacrifices, and smooths over cracks has power, when in reality, it is submission dressed up as choice. I thought I was resisting patriarchy, but I was reproducing it in my own decisions. I thought I was bold, but boldness without a room of one’s own is only half a revolution.

I am slowly discovering the flaws of my own choices. Why did I decide not to carve out a place for myself in my own house? Why did I play the martyr when it came to my own needs? Who told me to take the smaller piece of chicken? Who told me to ensure my family was fed on time, to refill the chia seed container, and to buy the minoxidil and magnesium? Who told me to take charge of everyone’s needs but mine? Why must I attune my time to everyone else’s rhythm?

On really depressive days, I sense my refugee status. This crisis of always being in no man’s land—it is my own creation. I am to blame. I never claimed a space in any of the homes I lived in. My status has always been like a temp file: hidden, unknown, quietly at work, saving the world I inhabit. A temp file is necessary; it holds everything together, but it is never acknowledged, never given permanence. It exists only to support the main program, then disappears without recognition.

That is how I have lived—essential but invisible, present but unclaimed. I became the background process of my own life, running silently so others could function, while my own needs remained suspended, waiting for a space that never came.

In this last quarter of my life, I see younger people naming their boundaries—sleep divorce (partners sleeping in different rooms rather than sharing a bed at night), quiet quitting (meeting only the basic expectations of a job or task), etc. Maybe what I have been practising all along is a kind of quiet quitting in relationships. My way of surviving in a system that normalised my invisibility. It was not resignation, but self-preservation. And yet, even in that withdrawal, I never claimed a room of my own. I stopped investing my full self where I was unseen.

Perhaps now, naming it is my first act of resistance, an insistence that my presence deserves more than sacrifice, that my life deserves more than background work. And of course, this was never just my story; it is the same story for countless women whose quiet quitting is mistaken for surrender or meekness. And this is not just personal—it is cultural. Women are often treated as belonging to the temporary, their labour seen as support work, their presence tolerated but not centred. The house belongs to the father, then the husband, then the child. The woman is the file that keeps the system running, but is deleted once the task is done. That invisibility is normalised, even celebrated, as sacrifice.

Even if I never had a room, I could claim the right to one now—if not in brick and mortar, then in words, in the least. Virginia Woolf once wrote that women need a room of their own in order to be able to create; I see now that I never demanded mine.

Raffat Binte Rashid is editor of My Dhaka at The Daily Star.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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