At the moment, I am thinking of my friends who, like me, hide their life behind cabinets or in drawers when company comes over. We stress that our possessions will paint a picture of us being less than minimal or aesthetic. As if we may perish at another’s thoughts, an idea of our real lives on display is too much: the lotion on the coffee table for those cracked hands post yard work, dog leashes, pacifiers, or burp cloths.
I think about my friend’s young daughter, whose small fingers grab for all things with feverish curiosity. Once, during a gathering at another friend’s house, her daughter opened a cabinet and was met with instant apologies from the cabinet owner.
“I am so sorry, don’t look in there. It’s filled with junk.” She said, flushed with embarrassment.
The cabinet’s contents were what you’d find in most homes: game boxes and extra remotes, wires and trinkets, a bin of odds and ends. You know the bin, the one holding an assortment of randoms; perhaps it’s the missing blue knob off the cabinet door, it poped off last week and you haven’t come around to fixing it yet, that spool of yellow yarn, coins, scissors, and tape.
We are privileged in many senses to have possessions which we categorise as “junk”, but it is a feverish compulsion to ensure our junk is only of what is to be admired by others, not anything more.
We convince ourselves to hide necessity as if it is shameful. To top it off, pursuing our idea of perfection leaves us exhausted.
Don’t get me wrong, cabinets and drawers exist for a reason and I am not saying don’t put things away. I love housing my assortment of creature comforts in baskets on my side coffee table (to feel organized and easily accessible). What I’m probing is the idea of shame; to what point does it feel embarrassing to admit that what lies behind our cabinet is not as strategically placed as the rest of our home? To what point, why do we feel embarrassed when we all have spaces like this? Unless you are Adrian Monk, the disorder, the need, the time you don’t have to set everything right all at once, is always kept somewhere— a closet, a cabinet, a drawer, a spare bedroom, a backpack.
It is a relief to me to peek behind the curtain. The wealthiest people I’ve known, some of whose homes are the image of lux-perfectionism, adorned with marble floors, white carpets, and dustless display pieces, have their real-life spaces too—corners of home where their worn chairs are the most comfortable, seated aside a scuffed wood table that has seen years of meals, turkey sauce spills, and late night card games—tables that shelf tissue boxes, lens wipes, and bottles of Advil. Items we “need” are the types of comfort we don’t want to always be on the hunt for.
The point I’m attempting to make here, if I haven’t already, is that we should find relief in our collective humanness. Worry less about refining our value to match the Instagram algorithm of charm and lean into the nostalgia that comes with not only curating our homes “look” but it’s feel as we, ourselves, reside within them.
So I ask you once more: Would it help to know that all our drawers have junk in them?
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