The light is a little blinding.
But that’s almost the point. It makes everything clear. There’s nothing here. The walls are white. The ceiling is white. The floor is white. Nowhere for anything to hide. Nowhere for me to hide, either.
This place makes me anxious.
There’s nothing to grab onto. No texture, no corner, no familiar object I can reach for and say — this. This is what I know. I end up here sometimes, mid-conversation, when someone asks me a question I don’t have the answer to but I can feel them waiting. Expecting something specific. Something I’m not able to give.
And so I scramble.
My eyes dart around the white room, frantic, searching for anything. I can feel my nails clawing at the walls, hoping I can dig something out of them. The first thing that floats through? I spit it out. I don’t pause. I don’t consider it. My only objective is to get out of the white room as fast as I can.
Networking events are the worst.
A few months ago, I showed up to one already bracing myself. I could feel the tension building in my body. One part of me genuinely wanting to connect with new people, another part calculating exactly how quickly I could leave without it being obvious. There were well-known people at this event. People I was apparently supposed to recognize, to have context on, to engage with meaningfully.
But my brain doesn’t work that way. I don’t hold onto who well-known people are. It just doesn’t stick. I can’t even remember a name, let alone any context.
So there I was — white room. Bright and empty and vibrating with anxiety.
And then I did something I’d never done before.
I sat down in it.
Just for a moment, I let myself be there. I let myself stop searching for an exit. I acknowledged, quietly and without judgment, that I wasn’t going to have any context about anyone in that room to work off of. That I was going to walk into every conversation essentially from scratch. I couldn’t change that.
Then, a simple thought popped into my mind.
What if I saw it as a canvas? There’s nothing in here, including no baggage. What if I gave myself permission to paint the walls? Each interaction adding something new, something that wasn’t there before.
That made me lean into the room with curiosity. What might the walls look like at the end?
I let myself decide that my only objective for the evening was to entertain myself. If a conversation sparked a real connection, wonderful. If it didn’t, that was okay too. I’d have a little inside joke with myself and flutter to the next person.
Something shifted.
The ceiling of the white room lifted — and all that anxiety just… floated out.
What replaced it was something lighter. Each conversation became bubbly, easy, a little silly. I started threads that genuinely amused me. And I watched something extraordinary happen: people leaned in. Bodies that had been stiff and braced — the same tension I’d walked in with — began to exhale. As though I was offering a life raft disguised as a laugh. One moment frozen and awkward, the next — animated, open, themselves.
Because fun is contagious. It pulls you in before you realize it. It isn’t closed off or performative. It’s just easy. And easy is rare enough at a networking event that people will gravitate toward it like a window in a room that’s been shut too long.
I didn’t need context. I didn’t need to remember anyone.
I just needed to pick up a paintbrush.
The white room will come back — it always does. But now I know it isn’t a trap.
It’s a blank canvas.
