The Door Was Never Locked: A Contemporary Symbolic Artwork of Memory, Fear, and Resilience
- Rovaida Saleh
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
As I painted this, I kept running my brush along the rough edges - the walls peeling like memory, the teal door scarred by time but still standing, as if endurance itself were an art form. The texture fought back, and I liked that. It reminded me how healing and resistance sometimes wear the same shade of blue.
The thought behind this painting came quietly, the kind that sneaks in when you’re not looking. What if the door was never locked? What if it was only me, standing guard. Out of fear, or maybe just habit? Sometimes the door stays closed because too many wrong people have walked through it; family, lovers, ghosts who should’ve knocked but didn’t. After enough intrusions, even a closed door feels dangerous. So we guard it. And we call that safety. Then we spend years searching for keys to rooms we built ourselves. It’s comforting, in a tragic way.
Fear lays the foundation. Memory paints the walls. Broken trust hangs the curtains. Coping, they say. I call it mise-en-scène for the emotionally cautious.
Time, I’ve come to realize, is a flat circle. We walk the same corridors in our minds, rearranging the furniture of old pain and call it growth. We compartmentalize to turn survival into a floor plan. Every room holds a secret; every shadow, a version of ourselves we still don’t trust.
Jung might call it integration. Freud, hmm … I imagine he’d pour himself some cognac and raise an eyebrow … and honestly, I’d join him. Who doesn’t love a good cognac, right? Because once you finally step through that door, it isn’t freedom that greets you. It’s silence; textured, uneven, like a wall that’s been painted over too many times to hide the cracks.
Hope lingers in those cracks too. Nietzsche called it the cruelest of evils, the thing that keeps us waiting for meaning to show up. I believe, it’s not the hope that kills you; it’s knowing it’s the hope that kills you, that kills you. We lock our emotions the way we lock old rooms, not because they’re dangerous, but because we don’t know what’s left inside them anymore.
Maybe, just maybe that’s all freedom ever is! No walls, no locks, just you and the void staring back? Or maybe, its something else? Or it is running out of places to hide, just to find yourself in a profoundly lonely place! I feel it is a blandiloquently tragic revelation, but at least it’s honest.
A closer look at the inspiration behind this work: Contemporary symbolic art.
Memory peels the walls, fear guards the doors, and resilience sips its cognac. Inspired by Jung, Freud, and Nietzsche, this painting captures emotional depth, personal growth, and the sardonic pursuit of inner freedom.