Water Closet

The house I grew up in was old. The doors still used skeleton keys and the floor boards creaked so badly that as kids we had to learn to step in very specific parts of the hallway to sneak to the living room to watch Saturday morning cartoons. My mom had a rule about no tv before 7 a.m., now that I’m older I can appreciate how she must have wanted some extra sleep.

In the center of our house was a water closet. If you opened it you would see a foot and a half of space in the bottom for air ventilation before you reached the baseboards holding up the water heater. It wasn’t a very big space and the one hallway in our house formed two of its walls. The main door to it faced the living room and ultimately the T.V. which is how I first became interested in it. The second door to it was in the bedroom I shared with my two sisters. My older sister’s bed came right up against the door so you had to move it back from the wall a few inches in order to get the door to open a bit. If you’ve read much of this blog at all you know that I’ve had nightmares my whole life. The result being that I was terrified of sleeping in the dark. Originally because I was absolutely certain there were gremlins living in my older sister’s side of the closet and later because if I was lucky enough to wake myself from a nightmare I needed some kind of stimulation to keep myself from drifting back to sleep. (As a side note: spell check includes the word gremlins.?!) Normally the dark of the water closet would have made me avoid it, but the bottom portion, the foot and a half I mentioned earlier was three sides vents that I could peek out of and listen to my parents talk or watch t.v. from after I was supposed to be in bed. The trick was getting back out of the closet before my older sister went to bed and shoved her bed back up against the door.

It used to feel like a portion of the house that was not part of the house; if I was in the ventilation space, then I didn’t exist. I know that’s wierd for a child to want. I spent so much of my life as a child feeling like people were always watching. My dad’s church, my family, my teachers, and if you managed to ever get a moment alone you still knew God was  watching. And if they are watching then it is because they expect you to do or be something a certain way. So it was nice to have a space where you just didn’t exist. Peaceful. As I got older I found ways to replicate that feeling. At school I knew how to fly under the radar. I met everyone’s expectation just enough that they didn’t feel the need to micromanage me. When I hit that awful stage in high school where everyday is  a fight with your mother I learned to put distance between myself and the situation. I would find myself repeating the word, “rock” over and over in my head so that I wouldn’t have to feel what was upsetting me, or I’d find myself telling myself, “this isn’t you, this is some other teenager fighting with her mom over something this idiotic, isn’t this absurd? Look at them.” Which usually resulted in me laughing at the situation which only enraged my mother more. Even as I grew older: in Thailand when I knew my engagement would have to end, I found myself wishing I could be on an island somewhere absolutely alone, away from my fiance, other people’s prying eyes, or even my loved ones who where trying to comfort or encourage me.

I guess I never really felt comfortable being myself,or even figuring out what myself is. Until I got fed up with it in grad school. Not fed up with not being myself so much as fed up with these invisible expectations my paranoid self seems to think everyone has of me. I made some new friends, the opposite of my normal church bunch thinking that I could be myself with them. They would not have the same expectations or judgements of me my church friends did. It felt true at first. Then I slowly came to realize that they had expectations of me just different ones than I had encountered before. I had to learn to put up boundaries, so I feel a little closer to figuring out who I want to be. It was stupid to think that the problem was an external one that could be fixed by changing environments. One of my “new” friends (M) gets drunk frequently. I find myself hauling him out of bars and tucking him into bed frequently. He seems as ill at ease with himself as I am, but I know he’d be there for me if I needed him and that he likes me in spite of my awkward and uncomfortable in my own skin ways and so I love him and he’s quickly become one of my favorite people. He doesn’t understand why I hang out with him and his friends. I don’t really know what to say. I can’t hide in that group and feel like they don’t expect anything of me anymore but I still like them. Each of them is so different so I don’t think it’s any one thing. I just like them even if we don’t always agree. M gets really drunk and asks how I could possibly keep hanging out with him. We seem to have this conversation every single time.

m: Why do you even hang out with me

k: I don’t know, probably because I have a sick need to fix people

m: huh, you aren’t changing an F******* thing about me, I can tell you that right now

k: yeah, I’m not really into it anyway, you couldn’t afford my counseling services.

m: have a drink

k: no thanks

m: why not? come on. what do you want? I’ll get it for you.

k: I really don’t feel like it, but thanks.

m: k, come on, seriously? why do you even hang out with any of us?

k: because you’re my friends?

m: B*******, I know why

k: this should be good, please tell me

m: you want to feel superior that’s why. you would rather judge all of us so that you don’t have to judge yourself.

He says this last line to me a lot lately. Not maliciously, he’s just like that when hes been drinking, he doesn’t like me any less for thinking it and it doesn’t bother me for him to say it. It was what made me realize that looking for an external change to my problem wouldn’t work. I told him that while I did judge people, even without realizing it, I don’t have any isues about judging myself. I judge myself worst of all.

I guess the problem with not putting any effort into figuring out what my own expectations are instead of always guessing at what I think others expect from me is that I don’t know how to judge myself accurately. I have no criterion. All of this to say: I guess it’s time to come out of the closet.

 

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