The Rooms That Raised Us
When people imagine where athletes recover, they usually picture places built for the body.
Training rooms with massage tables.
Ice baths or epsom salt soaks.
They envision weight rooms emptied after practice or musty lockers rooms after a big win. Recovery lounges with eucalyptus towels folded into neat stacks beside filtered water and electrolyte packets. There is nothing inherently wrong with those places. In fact, some of them have become sanctuaries for the women who use them. But whenever I see another conversation about recovery reduced to gadgets, protocols, or performance optimization, very different rooms come to mind. You won’t find them perfectly styled in an architectural magazine. None of them were designed by someone with the title of wellness consultant. They were ordinary enough that nobody thought they were worth documenting.
It’s our grandma’s kitchen table or front porch. My mom’s high school classmate’s beauty salon.
A backyard where dominoes, paper plates, and folding chairs kept the aunties and uncles going until 2 AM. They didn’t teach me how to stretch after a volleyball match or what to eat after walking eighteen holes. They taught me what it feels like when a space assumes your full humanity before you have done anything to earn it.
That distinction has stayed with me for much of my life, even before I had language for it.
I grew up around women who were almost always taking care of someone else. They worked long hours. They raised children. They carried churches, neighborhoods, marriages, and entire families in ways that history has become remarkably comfortable overlooking. Looking back now, I realize that very little about their lives suggested they should have had time to recover.
From the outside, they didn’t sit down long enough. But they did.
It wasn’t scheduled but it was built into the fabric of everyday moments.
It was the extra hour after dinner when nobody seemed particularly interested in leaving the table. It was the slow rhythm of shelling peas on the porch while the conversation wandered from family gossip to scripture to somebody's new job without anyone worrying about staying on topic. It was dropping into the beauty salon for "just a trim" and walking out three hours later after hearing enough stories to remember that your own life wasn't nearly as lonely as it had felt that morning.
None of those women would have described themselves as designing recovery. But that is exactly what was happening.
I think we've subconsciously adopted a very narrow imagination about where meaningful things happen.
Achievement belongs in stadiums.
Leadership belongs in boardrooms.
Art belongs in museums.
Athleticism belongs on fields and golf courses.
And recovery? Recovery, we're told, belongs in facilities specifically built for it.
But Black queer women have rarely had the luxury of separating life into those neat categories.
Our kitchens became classrooms. Our churches were organizing spaces. Front porches and car rides became therapy offices before anyone would have dared call them that. Beauty salons became places where a woman could arrive carrying something she hadn't yet admitted to herself and somehow leave feeling lighter without anyone insisting she explain exactly what had changed. These spaces were technologies of survival.
We were held in our excellence and reminded that we were more than whatever hardship had asked of us that week.
Now, when I walk into an athletic facility of any kind, I wonder if it knows what those rooms knew. I don’t applaud its fresh coat of wax. Does it understand that sometimes the most generous thing a space can offer is permission to linger?
Does it know that nourishment begins long before the meal arrives?
Does it understand that conversation is part of recovery?
That laughter after the game at the bottom of the bleachers changes the atmosphere of a room just as surely as lighting does?
That being expected is one of the deepest forms of rest a person can experience?
Those questions have become more interesting to me than whether the chairs are expensive or the towels are embroidered.
I've been in modest rooms that made me feel completely seen. I’ve also been in extraordinary spaces that never seemed to notice I was there.
Environments are about aesthetics, yes, but they are also about instruction.
Every room teaches.
Some rooms teach you to hurry. Others teach you to apologize for taking up space. Some teach you to stay alert. Others teach you that your body is an inconvenience.
And then, every so often, you encounter a room that teaches you something else entirely.
It teaches you that you can exhale and that your voice doesn't need to shrink.
That there is no prize for leaving first.
That someone imagined your comfort before you walked through the door. It’s the conversation that lasts another hour as you walk to the car. Personally, this is one of the highest forms of design.
When I say that PARLO is interested in recovery, this is what I mean.
I am not trying to recreate the kitchen where I grew up or romanticize the porch as though history itself were uncomplicated. Those rooms carried their own tensions and absences, just as every room does.
What I am interested in preserving is the intelligence they held.
The understanding that care can be choreographed without becoming transactional. That beauty and usefulness are not competing values. That ordinary materials can carry extraordinary meaning. That people return to places where they recognize themselves.
Black women and Black queer women have been designing those kinds of environments for generations. We weren’t commissioned; we just needed somewhere to become whole again.
I think the future of athletic design has far more to learn from those rooms than it does from another recovery gadget or another performance protocol.
The rooms that raised us were never merely places where life happened. They were our first teachers. They still have more to teach us.
