As humans –wait, let me rephrase that, as Adult Humans—we have the uncanny knack and the insatiable desire to put our best face forward. We’ve been told that first impressions are lasting impressions and we’ve been told to live as though we are always being watched. And on one level that’s not such a bad motto to live by. Until the best face forward becomes a mask that we are unable to remove.
One fortunate side effect of a growing relationship is that over time your mask and your partner’s mask is removed and you see the real person. This can be a challenging time in a relationship’s lifecycle. But the good thing about that is after you reach the other side of that challenge you grow closer and more confident in your trust for your partner and their trust for you. Unless you never make it to the other side because of a breakdown in trust. An already relatively unstable relationship will surely crumble under the weight of accusations and arguments. Never did I think I would give up so much of myself to another person. Never did I think that after giving my trust, it would be ripped up in such a way. That’s what lying does to a relationship…it rips up the trust like a maxed out credit card being pushed through an industrial strength shredder.
Being the anally neat person that I am, I really appreciate a person who is neat…and she was. I found her home equally as comfortable as my own. Until I looked in her closet. She had one of those closets that can make you afraid to stand in front of it, lest you open the door and everything topples over you. And not just one…but ALL of them. Cabinets, closets, storage closets. They were all filled to the brim and practically running over. They were cluttered with stuff. Lots of stuff. It was my idea to help her clean her bedroom closet. I had helped her reorganize and store things so that she could easily find them… then the next day it looked as though nothing had changed.
This had me thinking about people and their habits. We all have them…good ones, bad ones, ugly ones… Some people drink, some shop, some eat, some workout, some do drugs, some cheat on their mates, some lie, some write, some paint, some sing, some pick their cuticles. The point is what we do externally can directly mirror what our internal emotional and psychological state is. She had a bad habit of lying. I have a bad habit of overanalyzing (picking). Her habit of lying can be seen in how she hoards and stores. My habit can be seen in how I pick my cuticles. Yes it’s disgusting to pick to your cuticles, but it has this amazing calming effect. So anyway, last night after allowing the last tear of breakup to fall, it dawned on me that lying tends to be a behavior we do to cover up something. If she were a habitual liar, then she must have held on to a lot of experiences, some old, some new, some good, some bad. Just like her overstuffed closets.
So if you want to know what a person’s emotional and psychological state is, look in their closets. If an otherwise neat person has a mangled array of crap in their closet, it’s probably safe to assume they have a mangled array of crap in their psyche.
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Interesting thoughts. If a closet is a gateway to the inner psyche, then first impressions aren't as reliable as we are led to believe; something I've always believed. I never put a lot of stock in first impressions. I'd have no friends, because I'm told that on first impressions I appear to be a real d**k. The point is value. How much value, or stock, do you put in a persons' initial appearance being an indication of who they are? Same question as to how they keep their residence, their car, etc. What signs are obvious bad one and which are good? Or is it simply a roll of the dice every time...?
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