Recently, I stayed at a friend’s place, and her 13-year-old daughter kindly let me sleep in her bedroom. To be clear: the daughter was staying elsewhere. I lay on the single bed, under her muslin canopy, in the cosy glow of fairy lights and took in my surroundings: books, clothes, mementos, a ceramic terrier she’d made in art class, and wall-to-wall Eminem posters.

I found myself reflecting on my own teenage bedroom, how it had served as my power spot and refuge, and I wondered if I’d ever so fully inhabited a space since.

For all of my childhood I shared a bedroom. When you’re spoiled for siblings you become adept at carving out places for privacy. You could be private in your head, I learned that early on. You could carry a whole other world in there. When my parents decided to renovate, I finally had a room of my own. One of my first alterations was to create a bunker with my bookshelf, so that anyone who opened the door wouldn’t see me straight away.

Behind the bunker, I’d recline on pillows and stare at the pictures on my walls, my collage of teenage dreaming. My sisters and I shared and pillaged images from Smash Hits or Dolly, or even TV Week. Blu Tack became a currency. We had to claim different pop stars to divvy up the posters without bloodshed.

Dolly was our Design Files. An article that stands out in my memory was headlined “Big Ideas for a Tiny Bedroom”. It was a tour of a teenage girl’s bedroom that highlighted her ingenious use of space. She had a fold-down desk and a fold-up chair. She stored her pyjamas in a small chest, which doubled as an “entertainment centre” with her TV, telephone and lamp. (I could manage the lamp but the other two objects fell outside my budget.)

Personal objects are never just objects. They are clues, data, intel. I took note of the pin board, the cute stationery holder, the Fiorucci print, the dried flower arrangement. Her bed was dressed up like a couch with cushions flush against the wall. I decided that the girl was feminine, organised and popular. She probably wrote poetry. She may have even been published in Dolly’s very own Poet’s Corner, something I aspired to, but, alas, would never achieve.

Another article to make its mark came from Mimi Pond’s The Valley Girls’ Guide to Life, a joke ethnography that I took very seriously. Pond used words such as habitat and environment to describe the valley girl’s bedroom. To me, these scientific terms acknowledged the teenager as fully realised, not just an undeveloped half-person. But then: “Things to have in your bedroom are: a rainbow mobile, a totally awesome sound system, all your cosmetics out so you can have everything at your fingertips (perfume and lip gloss and nail polish go in little baskets everywhere), unicorns are totally cool, Stevie Nicks collects them too …”

I had little baskets everywhere but not nearly enough make-up to fill them. Often a basket would only contain one item: a tube of Bonnie Bell lip gloss, plum nail polish, or an eyeshadow palette in autumnal shades. Now, when I think of these vessels with their sole cargo I think of special collections, prize exhibits and synecdoche: one thing standing for all the things together: girlhood, performance, wishing.

Movies also taught me how a teenage bedroom should be. In the opening scenes of Pretty in Pink, the camera tracks slowly over Andie’s bedroom, offering an abundance of visual detail. From her make-up, to her vintage clothes draped everywhere, to her photos and books, I gleaned a girl, femme (make-up, pink), who liked art (Picasso print) and was serious about school (textbooks).

The photos on her mirror (BFFs Ducky and Jen) revealed social attachments, and the glimpsed photo of her mother hinted at a mystery. The camera’s caress of Andie’s bedroom lasted mere seconds but it was enough for me to covet her whole world. My main takeaway was that my bedroom should have a dizzying profusion of mess and stuff. I started op-shopping with a vengeance.

Lady Bird’s bedroom holds up the tradition of teenage mess, and signals to the complexity of a person living in the liminal.

In Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, the production designer and set decorator wanted the character’s bedroom to show her layers of history, and echo the feeling of coming of age. They did this by mixing past and present objects and ephemera. For Lady Bird’s collaged walls, they looked for images that didn’t need clearance, or made their own, including the “Lady Bird for President” posters.

Lady Bird’s bedroom, with its pink walls, ribbons, band posters, art experiments, and prints of wolves and wild birds, holds up the tradition of teenage mess, and signals to the complexity of a person living in the liminal.

Photos of my teenage bedroom show a similar self-in-flux: the would-be sophisticate inside the outer-suburban sad girl. There are Jim Beam bottles that I’ve repurposed as vases and black-and-white photo strips of friends in goofy poses. One wall bears a “deep” self-portrait, and another has posters of dinosaurs. For a while, I curated an altar with tarot cards, crystals, incense, and rune stones, tools to bring me love and riches or something beyond my daily boredom.

Loading

In my late teens, I wrote and painted most nights, but my creations rarely left the house. I didn’t know what to do with them, or myself. The photos only give a glimpse, but I know that inside those four walls I made myself up. I fell into books and music, lied in my diary, scoffed chocolate, smoked myself sick, lorded my wins, licked my wounds, cried big tears, and felt everything as if feeling was an artform.

There’s a Tumblr dedicated to teenage bedrooms on screen. Sometimes, when I’m scrolling it, a still will jump out at me, some detail I remember, and was already all over back in the day. I’ll have a minute of silence for the place (and self) now lost to the past.

When my parents sold our family home I felt no sadness; I was eager to get to my next self. There followed a pause to collect myself before I moved into my first share-house, a Fitzroy worker’s cottage. The house had a name, ‘Lanark’, a Welsh word meaning “clear space”. I took this as a directive. I would not bleed my identity all over my new space.

I bought a futon and red cotton sheets, but kept the decor muted. My possessions were portable and utilitarian and I aspired to leave no traces. In this way, I could make it look like I had no past. I had never been a teenager with a teenage bedroom. I had simply arrived.

Looks like teen spirit

You can tell a lot about pop culture’s most iconic teenage characters from the rooms where they dream. In this random selection of the most memorable teen-girl bedrooms, Lindy Percival and Kylie Northover go looking for clues...

Clueless (1995)

What teenage girl didn’t sigh at the sight of Alicia Silverstone’s Cher selecting her outfits via an auto-dress computer program stocked with impeccably coordinated possibilities?

Throw in pink-striped walls, oversized mirrors and display shelves groaning with high-end footwear, and this is surely cinema’s finest display of teen-girl fantasy.

Heartbreak High (2022-24)

Loading

Quinni, like the actor who plays her, Chloe Hayden, lives with autism, and her bedroom in the acclaimed Australian series - all soft toys, fairy lights and cushions - is where she seeks solace when she’s overwhelmed.

While other teens might have band posters on their walls, Quinni’s room is a shrine of fan art to her favourite (fictional) fantasy book series Angeline of the Underworld, which features a demon girl. Heartbreak High season two is on Netflix from April 11.

Wednesday (2022)

Having inherited the Gothic sensibility of the Addams family clan, Wednesday is startled to find that her sparky roommate at Nevermore Academy of Outcasts is a fan of stuffed toys, fairy lights and multi-coloured bedding. Forced to draw the line – literally – between Enid’s space and her own, Wednesday dulls things down with a palette to match her own pallid complexion – think dim lighting, unadorned walls, an antique typewriter and a dark-hued cello on which to vent her disgust.

The Exorcist (1973)

Before she invited the anti-Christ in for a sleepover, Regan MacNeil’s bedroom was an unremarkable arrangement of timber furnishings and beige walls. It’s only post-possession, when the temperature has dropped to arctic levels, potential projectiles safely stowed and the troubled teen (yes, we’re asserting a more universal theme here) strapped to her newly padded four-poster bed, that the minimalist decor starts turning heads for all the wrong reasons.

Never Have I Ever (2020-23)

Devi Vishwakumar is struggling with the realities of life as an uncool, American-Indian high school student with raging hormones, and the clues are all there in her decoratively diverse bedroom. Just like her, it’s all over the place - the curtains are pink, the walls teal blue, a macrame light shade hangs, head-height, beside her wrought iron bedhead and mismatched chairs traverse the spectrum from purple tie-dye to yellow plastic. That high-school heartthrob who arrives to relieve her of her virginity can’t say he hasn’t been warned.

Such Brave Girls (2023)

Kat Sadler is a British comedian, actress, and writer whose series about a dysfunctional family made up of a single mum and her two daughters sprang from her own mental health struggles. Josie might be in her early 20s, but she has the furrowed brow of a misunderstood teenager and a corresponding need for a place in which to a) hide away and b) assert her individuality. Covering the pink walls of her bedroom are posters declaring that “Love knows no gender”, “Bisexuals are valid” and whatever it is that she’s going through is “Not a phase”. Throw in some black and white photo booth pictures, riot grrrl imagery and assorted butterflies, and it’s clear that this is a young woman determined to emerge on her own terms. Such Brave Girls premieres on Stan on April 18.

The Brady Bunch (1969-74)

Granted, the show’s real lure for fans of modernist architecture is that glorious sunken loungeroom where the blended offspring of Mike and Carol Brady gather in all their well-scrubbed perfection. But wander up that timber and metal staircase and you’ll find the gender stereotypes stubbornly resistant to the era’s changing attitudes. The boys’ room - with its blue bunk beds and timber-lined walls - is a messy counterpoint to that vision of girlhood where Marcia, Jan and Cindy slumber under quilted sateen, pink walls lined with painted flowers and shelves heavy with neatly arranged high-achiever ribbons. A patriarchal picture of feminine perfection, if ever there was one.