The Hallway
Rooms and self-reflection
I love me some good questions for self-reflection, and no one writes better questions for Allie Crummy’s soul than Emily P. Freeman. Freeman is a spiritual director, author, lecturer, and podcaster. She also has a Substack newsletter called The Soul Minimalist — check it out! I’ve been a frequent listener to her podcast for years, and I’ve read four of her books — the most recent of which was How to Walk Into a Room, which I read last January as I was in the midst of my self-imposed songwriting challenge, Songuary.
In the book, Freeman invites the reader to imagine their life as though it’s a large house or building with lots of rooms. Each room represents a different part of your life: one room represents your job, another room for your relationship with a particular friend or family member, another one for hobbies or passion projects, etc. You’ll pick a room to focus on, and she leads you through a series of questions about the room. This way of visualizing places where I have some measure of belonging helped me to see each of my “rooms” with fresh eyes.
“I was in this room before
The other side of that closed door
A place, a place and nothing more”
Photo by Matt Crummy
Should I stay or should I go?
Freeman wrote this book after making the hard decision to leave the church she had been a part of for years. Matt and I went through that same type of decision back in 2021, so I could relate. However, when I read this book in January 2025, I was not in a place where I was thinking about making any big life changes. That being the case, I still found it quite helpful to walk through her questions; it helped me to fully own my place in each room — kind of like I was renewing my subscription to each room as an act of my own agency, rather than blindly continuing on.
“If you see me in the hallway
In a state of disarray
I tried, I tried”
Then, of course, there’s the imagery for when you are considering whether or not to stay in a room. You’re not sure if you are ready to leave, and you’re not sure if you want to stay. You’re in the hallway. This is the idea that inspired my song — but since I wasn’t thinking about leaving any rooms in my life at the time, I wrote this song more like a work of fiction than autobiography.
Photo by Matt Crummy
The fiction section of the song catalog
As I wrote this song, I carried Freeman’s words with me, as she described how she felt about making the hard decision to move on from their church that had been a home to them for many years. I carried emotions from friends as they were considering leaving their church, changing their job, or weighing whether a relationship was working or not. And I also carried the sadness of people who have stayed in rooms that other people had left — sometimes there is no love lost, and other times it feels like a personal offense. Though this song is a work of fiction because it is not based on one specific thing, it carries fragments of real emotions from a plethora of sources.
“Am I getting in my own way?
Am I overly afraid?”
“You probably think this song is about you [or ____ ]”
I’m always afraid of being misunderstood when I write songs. I know I’m not alone in this (Emily Brimlow recently shared something along these lines). I’m afraid that people close to me will hear some lyric and misunderstand me because of it. They’ll zero in on one word that I chose because it rhymed or because it fit well with the melody or because the consonants had just the right percussiveness… but they’ll take it to mean whatever logical conclusion makes sense to them. These aren’t unfounded fears for me — it’s happened, and it continues to happen. It hurts to feel misunderstood, and it really hurts to feel misunderstood twice: 1) you didn’t really get my song, and 2) you don’t really get me, do you? It’s a hazard of the job of a songwriter; one that I am more than willing to accept because the joys far outweigh this frustration. But it is a real thing. Carly Simon knows.
Photo by Matt Crummy
I’ve been to a circus, but not this one
The thing about fiction is that it’s a made up story, and each detail shouldn’t be interpreted piece-by-piece like an allegory. An author might write a fictional story that takes place at a circus; perhaps that author has been to a circus before, and their familiarity with a circus environment helps them to write a believable story, even though it’s not about that exact same circus. Maybe some of the characters in the story borrow traits from people the author knows in real life, but that doesn’t mean that the characters are meant to represent anyone in particular.
In the same way, I’ve been in “The Hallway”, just not this exact hallway. The character in “The Hallway” is making a big life decision. She is deciding whether she should stay or go, and she’s tired. She’s done all she can to make it work, but she’s still not sure. The song ends before she makes a decision, though I imagine that she will stay. This song isn’t about anything I’m going through, anything I went through, or anything anyone around me is going through — it’s an artist interpretation of many of those things, plus some imagination, smooshed together into a work of fiction. Some of these feelings are real, some are empathetically felt, others are purely speculative. That’s what’s fun about songwriting: it’s writing! In all the ways that fiction writing can enrich our lives and our compassion for other people, I think that songwriting — be it autobiographical, fictional, or otherwise — can do the same.
Listen to “The Hallway” everywhere you stream now.
