Your room is not your prison. You are.

The line appears in Plath’s private journal entry written while she was at Smith College in summer 1953. She is admonishing herself during a period of severe distress, framing her sense of confinement as coming from her own mental state rather than from her dorm room or the institution, and urging herself toward self-directed change.

The quotation argues that the feeling of being trapped is primarily internal: the mind’s patterns can create confinement even when external circumstances are not physically restrictive. It’s a harsh, self-blaming form of motivation—insisting that relief depends on personal agency rather than a change of location.

Your room is not your prison. You are. And Smith cannot cure you; no one has the power to cure you but yourself.

It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself.