Stephen,

I am slowly catching up on your podcasts – my only chance to listen (having two small boys at home) is on my way to work four days a week.  Every day I feel like writing in because the podcast always seems to touch some part of me.  Yesterday I listened to Contagion, which I was incredibly moved by – but today, listening to Man in the Closet, I felt something else.  I was touched by the similarities in our seemingly dissimilar childhoods.  Fear and closets exist somewhere in the minds of most children.  Growing up, I was always afraid of my closet.  There was a terribly scary wolf who lived in mine. Well, my older brother and mother now insist that it was a cute dog/shoe holder, but I thought he was terrifying.   As an adult I know that I could have asked my mother to take it away and it would no longer have been an issue, but maybe even as a child part of me realized that locating all of those fears of the unknown into some sort of tangible object, was less scary than having it be less defined.  I would never go to sleep with my back turned away from the closet, for fear that he might creep out and come get me.  I was terrified for years over this.

But one night my closet became something else.  It became my refuge.  This night I woke up and heard noises in my house.  We lived on the outskirts of a small town in _____.  My mother worked nights as a nurse, and my stepfather worked evenings as a mechanic for the city of ______, but I was most often alone until he came home at 3 or 4 in the morning.  I looked out the window and did not see their cars in the driveway, so I knew the noises were not either of them.  Then I heard gunshots and someone running through the house.  I think I was about 10 or 11.  This wasn’t something that happened in small towns in the Finger lakes.  I am not even able to recall the emotions that I felt, but I remember hiding in that closet all night long, with my yellow lab, Sunny.  Even after the gunshots ended, I stayed in the closet.  Maybe part of me felt the strength in the power that my years of terror of the closet held.  I don’t know.  But I think it has something to do with the known and the unknown.  I chose that night to embrace the power of that fear to keep safe from something  very real.  That, and having the love and security of my dog, kept me (emotionally) safe.

A few years later, after my stepfather was arrested for possession of cocaine and I learned that he had been selling it out of our home, I was able to get some clarity on the events of that night.  Although in some ways I felt less safe afterwards,  my feelings about my closet changed.  I could sleep with my back to it, knowing that I could choose to embrace its power.

Even the less positive side effects of that night most likely eventually lead me to do the work that I do now, dealing with childhood trauma.  So, to quote yet another one of your memorable podcasts, never argue with the road…