Why The Closet

and spending time with your parts

There is a room inside a bathroom inside a bedroom on a farm in the middle of nowhere Texas, and for a long time, it was the only place I felt safe.

It was tiny. A walk-in, but just barely. It had wallpaper with tiny white clouds on the ceiling. My mom and I picked out the wallpaper on one of our trips to San Antonio. On the worst days, and there were very bad days, two handles of vodka a day, I would retreat there. Not because anyone told me to. Not because I had a plan. Just because it was the most interior place I could find, and interior felt like the right direction.

I wrote about one particular day in my closet in Liking Myself Back. I was seventeen. I had a callus cutter. I was in my emotions, in my worst thoughts about myself, in the darkest version of who I believed I was. I was unlovable. I was not worthy of love. I want to be careful here because this is not a story about blame. It was not my parents’ fault, it was not anyone’s fault. It was a girl in a closet, in tremendous pain, doing the only thing she knew how to do with it, which was turn it inward.

What I remember most, though, is not the pain. It’s the clouds.

I would lie on the floor and look up at them and something in me would just settle. Not fix. Not resolve. Settle. Like the closet itself was doing something the rest of the world couldn’t.