Monsters in the Basement
Basements can be scary places. When I misbehaved as a kid, my parents put me in timeout behind the door to the basement stairs. I never actually went down the stairs, where the oil heater made weird noises, and mice scurried around amid the boxes and garden tools, and there were probably dead bodies hidden behind the wood pile. I just sat at the top of the stairs with my back against the door, counting the seconds until my timeout was over and I could rejoin the world of the living.
Now that I’m grown up, I find that basements are still a little scary, but not for the same reason. A couple of years ago, when I was getting my house ready to put on the rental market, I found myself completely paralyzed with the thought of cleaning out my basement. It was mostly just full of junk--things tossed down there because I thought they might be useful someday, or I might get around to fixing them, or I just didn’t have time to take them to the dump or Goodwill. As individual items, none of them were valuable or heavy or all that difficult to dispose of, but as an accumulation they felt like Mount Everest.
Thankfully, my partner Jess took pity on me and put her prodigious logistical powers to work on my behalf. In just a couple of days, the two of us had everything cleaned out or packed away, and all my resistance and procrastination seemed ridiculous in retrospect.
Why is it so much easier to clean out someone else’s basement than your own? I think it’s because the burden of removing the junk is miniscule compared to the burden of feeling responsible for it. Because it's our junk, it carries the emotional weight of our failures, our laziness, our poor planning, our unwise purchases, and our unrealized dreams. The basement is where we hide the things we’d rather not deal with, and when we’re forced to acknowledge them, we freeze like deer in the headlights.
Our psyches have basements, too. They’re stuffed full of our ugliest emotions, unresolved conflicts, past traumas and our personal secrets. They carry the weight of our flaws and failings and shame. Most of the time, even the thought of cleaning them out makes us nauseous, so we do everything we can to make believe they’re not there. But even with the door bolted shut, they’re scary, and whenever we have to go down there, we’re completely paralyzed.
Strangely, though, that other people don’t see it that way. If we get up enough courage to take someone down there with us--someone we trust, who knows their way around a messy basement--they don’t run away screaming. To them, it’s just a bunch of old junk and a few mouse turds.
“Oh well,” they say, “It’s not so bad. I’ve seen a lot worse.”
And then they roll up their sleeves and start packing boxes, and suddenly you find that you can too.
