My childhood closet was six foot long slanted space created by two sliding doors meeting the angle of the low ceiling. It was probably only 5 feet high at most but for some reason the darkness emanated from that closet like a pit of hell. Like all children I was afraid that something would jump out of the closet at me. Well into late elementary school, I was nervous every time I reached  in to grab something off a hanger, fearful something would reach from the deeper darkness beyond the halloween costumes and grab me back. 

In college, I was taking a  friend to task one day about how defensive and withholding he seemed to be with his girlfriend, and he rebuffed me saying  some version of “I have a vault. It’s where I keep my scary self. I’m not letting her in there.”  I’m pretty sure he described it as a basement that he wasn’t going to let her down into, but I heard it as a deep dark closet in my head. 

The back bedroom closet of the duplex in Athens in ‘04  was one long wall covered in louver doors. I would love to paint my wife as a stereotype, and a good fraction of that closet was filled with her stuff, but I hadn’t done much purging myself.  Our frequent moves for work made for a lot of piles, and those doors hid a lot of sins. One evening while we were watching TV in the living room, we heard an incredibly loud cascading ruckus, such as Santa Claus would make if he fell down a chimney out of  the fireplace and overturned the bookshelves.  With our adrenaline spiking, we ran into the bedroom, to see who was breaking in, to find that the central support point of the hanging closet bars had torn free of the wall, and our clothes being actively vomited out into the bedroom. We watched, stunned, as the last of the shirt-a-lanches came to rest on top of our bed.

I’ve always thought that most people who are afraid to show others their “dark secrets” are more afraid of seeing themselves. They seem to push things down deep and fear what will happen if they “let it out“. In my experience when people keep things bottled up and cluttered up and secret, eventually the central pillar rips free and it spills out all over their lives.

—

This post was vaguely inspired by the “A Problem Squared” podcast. It features a mathematician and a comedian giving advice/answering questions. Episode 2 has them experimenting on “the most efficient way” to store shirts.