A promising start

Rockyatu Otoo, 31, was born in a stone-colored building with a grand, Victorian entrance in The Bronx, New York. Her Ghanese mother and father raised her and her siblings in a sprawling five-bedroom apartment on the 15th floor, with windows overlooking a playground across the street and the busy sidewalks below.

As a child, she shared a bedroom in the back of the apartment with her younger sister, and it was there that she discovered her love of books. She spent many hours throughout her childhood reading in a sunlit corner of the room – a corner that is still, today, where she goes to recharge her batteries. She always loved her hometown, and after graduating from college, she thought she would find happiness and fulfillment by pursuing a stable job with a regular schedule. She was employed by a non-profit and enjoyed her work – but after a few years she felt stuck, and she began to look beyond the borders of her daily life for a different kind of experience.

“I thought that by getting that 9-5, my life would be excellent, and I could just relax,” she says. “I wanted to settle into a working routine and enjoy living here. But I got to a point where I just felt, I want to do something else, I’m a little bit bored. I don’t think this is it for me; I wasn’t sure it was what I felt fulfilled by.”

A journey abroad

Despite having acquired the trappings of a traditionally successful lifestyle, something didn’t feel right. So, in 2015, she decided to leave her family’s apartment in the Bronx – and the comforts of the familiar – and to move to Spain to teach English.

“I was really motivated by just discovering the world,” she reflects. “And through working with three different schools teaching English, I fell in love with the classroom. I had no idea that I would love teaching the way that I did, the idea of creating an entirely different space for the students and myself.”

It was while living abroad that she missed New York, for the first time in her life. She missed the energy, the culture, the pace of life, and she understood that she would likely never find another city that could replace what her hometown represented to her.

“You have to leave New York to really understand how unique this place is,” she says. “I really was able to appreciate that fact, and I realised I will always have to have a home base in New York, no matter what. But I left Spain in peace, and I came back here knowing that I wanted to be working as an educator and working with kids.”

The path back home

Luckily, she was able to return to a safe environment: her childhood apartment, where her brother and sister were still living. Her mother had recently returned to Ghana, so Rockyatu and her siblings became the caretakers of their home. She found work teaching third grade in a charter school and continues to dream about creating her own curriculum, potentially for adults as well as children.

Returning to this familiar space as an adult, with life experience behind her, Rockyatu was able to see and to experience the rooms she knew so well in a completely different way.

“There are little places around the apartment that I’ve discovered as an adult that I didn’t even notice as a child, when I was just speeding through this place,” she says. “As an adult, I can be a lot slower, I can take introspective time to reflect on what’s here, and I’ve enjoyed that. COVID also invited me to really make sense of home, and be at home, as opposed to treating home like a place to put my bag down, and then go.”

A few years ago, she tried to move away from her family and experience living on her own, in another apartment in the Bronx. But her life in the cramped one-bedroom, she says, felt like it was reduced to a series of activities, an endless cycle of “functioning, not living.”

“I think I was trying to understand what home could mean if I was not living in my childhood home, but I found it so difficult to recreate the feeling I get here,” she says. “That apartment was just bedroom, kitchen, bathroom: there was nothing else, so I didn’t have the opportunity to just be. I was either cooking, sleeping, or using the bathroom. And I found myself trying to put a chair by the window to make a sitting space, trying to recreate spaces that I could just be in, but it was incredibly difficult.”

The family historian

Since returning, again, to her childhood home, Rockyatu has discovered even more things about the apartment that are significant to her. The layout includes hallways, entryways, and foyers that tie the rooms together like connective tissue and create an abundance of “useless” spaces that serve no obvious practical purpose. In these modest, unnoticed nooks and crannies, like a small corner by the window in the family kitchen, which offers an inspiring view of surrounding rooftops and subway tracks, Rockyatu was able to set aside the hustle of daily life, and to simply “be.”

“One of the features of the apartment that I love is all the curves, and the archways that I think are really unique to it,” she says. “My absolute favorite is this space in between the bedrooms and the bathroom; I just stand there and I feel like I’m in this triangle of a place, a weird place that doesn’t serve any function but is really great to stand in. I stand there, and I’m just on earth. I don’t think they make apartments with places where you can just stand anymore.”

The childhood bedroom she used to share with her sister now belongs exclusively to her, and she has transformed it into a sanctuary. Serene tones of greys, rosy pinks, and blues run throughout, from the curtains hanging delicately over the window to her coordinated bedding sets, which she changes frequently based on her mood. The two windows overlooking the street each serve an important function beyond bathing the room in gentle sunlight: under one is a sleeping sofa, placed in the exact same spot where she kept a sofa as a child. Under the other, she has installed one of the most significant objects in her life: her father’s wooden desk, which she inherited when he passed away. With broken, patina’d handles and chipped paint, it is an ancestral item that she says she will never modify – or even repair.

“I think this is a deep, important table, and something that I hold onto as home – I feel like I’m calling the spirit of my daddy when I’m at this table because I’m taking care of important things here,” she says. “And I love that I have it in my bedroom because I can still do important work in the space that I love to rest. To me, rest is important. Affirming myself is important. Writing in my journal is important. And when I’m at home, being at ease is important. So even when I do my serious work, I can exist here at ease in my bedroom, even though I’m not asleep.”

Her bedroom has become a hub for her, the place where she sleeps, reads, gets ready for the day, and takes care of the business of life – which for her means anything that requires serious and focused attention. Books have always been her “first love,” and she has surrounded herself with them, as well as letters she’s received over the years, artifacts and trinkets from her travels, important images, and pictures of her family.

“When I was a child, my mom bought this beautiful scrapbook and I was responsible for collaging all our family pictures together, so I really feel like the family historian – like I have to be the caretaker of some things,” she says. “I also feel like the writer of my family. And so it’s really important for me to protect the things that I know are creative gems. And that’s why protecting this home is important. That’s why this desk is important. I feel grateful that I am the caretaker of this space, holding it for my nieces and nephews, for my children. Because someday I will write about this place.”