Ghost Outlets and Kicking Holes in Walls

Once upon a time, I may or may not have kicked a hole in the wall of our brand new house, then covered it up by gluing an outlet cover over it, then covered that up by gluing on childproof plugs.  And I didn't tell anyone.

For a long time, my secret fear was that Chris would decide to vacuum, try to plug in the cord, the wall would collapse, he'd fall into the hole, and I'd find him up to his armpit in the wall yelling, "How the hell did the home inspector not catch this?!"

It was stressful. 

Secrets are stressful.  Sometimes it is a secret about something shameful we have done.  Other times, it is a secret that someone has done something terrible to us and we just cannot get over it.  Even other times it might be that we just think we are abnormally depressed or weird or angry or crazy.

 

from Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy

There is so much power in the secretiveness of it.  It gets in your mind and defeats you.  You feel isolated and different.  There is nothing more powerful and defeating than feeling "other."

I read this yesterday.  It got under my skin in the best way.  The character Dr. More has been committed to a psychiatric ward (as a patient) because of terrors and anxieties and depressions he cannot understand or conquer.  His doctor friend Max is doing rounds with some interns, and they stop at Dr. More's bedside:

Okay, obviously I am not saying that this is the way to treat mental health...if only it were that easy.  However, the powerful part is that Dr. More's problem is mostly that he feels so "other" than the rest of the world.  Everyone seems to be going about their business, and he doesn't care about his "business" at all.  He can't "get with it," you know?  And the contrast between himself and the people around him was paralyzing him.

When Max gives it a name, the overwhelmingness is zapped.  The fear is gone.  Someone looked into his eyes and said, "Yeah well, shit happens."
(I wish he'd said that exactly; that would have been hilarious).

And that helped him heal.

I'll give you a personal example:
One reason the ghost outlet HAUNTED me was that we were in our new house.  I cried with relief when we left our condo, because it was filled with holes in the walls.  It was like a shrine to my temper.  I had thrown shoes, tossed adirondices over the balcony (that is plural for adirondack chairs), thrown hairbrushes, broken picture frames...I was kind of a maniac, people.

Anyway, I had been to counseling, gotten off my make-you-crazy-birth-control-pills, and worked through things with my very understanding and steady-as-the-day-is-long-husband.  I was finished with those shenanigans.

I was so done, that I felt God had symbolically and graciously given me a fresh start and fresh walls.

Until.
Until I kicked that damn hole in the wall the first month we lived there.
The horror.  The secret.

I will give you an example from a different perspective.  Your friend has something terrible happen to them...I have had friends who have really suffered.  People close to me have lost children, lost parents too young, been abused by people they trusted, and the list goes on . . . well, you know.  You have those friends.  Maybe you even are those friends.

I have been with them sometimes when they finally admit that they are furious that these things have happened.  Or people have told them that "everything happens for a reason," but they can't wrap their mind around that.  And the fact that people expect them to believe it, makes them so mad and confused.  And they feel guilty about it.  So now we have the people who have suffered, also feeling angry and guilty. And even though they've dealt with their first secret (the loss), they have a whole new secret to bear:  that they can't deal with the loss "right."

Sometimes, I have shared one of my own losses or failures or hole-kickings with someone, and their answer was, "Of course you're angry!  I'd be furious!"

or "Oh, lots of people feel like doing that."  It gave me freedom to acknowledge the anger and move toward healing. They were not approving the action necessarily, but they understood it.

Once I confessed a hole-kicking type incident to my pastor, I was repenting and gnashing teeth and rending garments, and finally he said (almost rolling his eyes), "Well, let's not act like it was worse than it was."  I almost laughed.  It was the best possible thing someone could have said to me at that time.

When things are inside, they seem so big, so insurmountable.  But when you finally mention it to someone, and they acknowledge you are normal, or at least only normal amounts of crazy . . . well, that can work wonders.

I'm not sure what my point is.  I just read this passage, and thought, "Yes, Walker Percy, you're right.  That is love."  Maybe we can't get past things until a friend tells us that it's okay we're not past it.

Or that "Yes, Pam, lots of people have holes in their walls.  Not just the mafia, Honey."

(If you're concerned, Chris never fell into the wall.  He found the outlet years later and repaired it.  By then, he already knew I was only normal-crazy, so it was no big deal).