I haven't told my best friend, Annette, that I saw her basement. I don't think she wants to know. I didn't mean to see her basement, but I was bringing my son, Henry, over, and as I walked in the side door, I knocked over a stepladder with the carseat, and the stepladder knocked over the broom, which clattered all the way down the basement stairs. Such is life with a carseat.
This is the thing about Annette's basement: it looks shockingly, surprisingly like my own. And that makes me feel so much better about myself that I want to lay down on the floor for a while and just breathe in the okayness that floods through me.
I don't know if there are things in your life that are harbors and safe houses for all your shame and secrets, things that you would just die if anyone saw or knew about, but for me, I have two. One is my butt, and the other is my basement. I've spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars trying to disguise my butt, trying to make it look a lot more like someone else's butt, or at least camouflage it well enough to fade into the surrounding foliage or cityscape. And my basement is like the holding area for everything that's wrong with my life, all the broken down bits and pieces that I have banished from my upstanding, upstairs life, but still lurk, threatening to expose me, in the basement.
Somewhere in the high-achieving, shiny, Midwestern corner of the world I grew up in, it became very clear to me that we are not supposed to have basements like my basement. It's okay to have some shelving, and some tidy boxes and stacks on the shelves. It's okay to have a not-good-enough-for-the-upstairs couch, and the retired TV, and some weights or a treadmill. It is distinctly not okay to have a basement that is a sprawl of framed and unframed art prints, a fondue set that has fallen out of its box, a slipcover and a mattress pad, thousands of CDs spread all over one corner, cobwebs and wrenches and a wallpaper steamer and a stack of all the stained clothes I meant to soak but never have, and mousetraps and dust bunnies and extra toilet paper and forty-seven half-used paint cans. That's not okay. That's what bad, messy people do - people who are (dare I say it?) lazy. I have a lazy person's basement, and it bothers me a lot in the middle of the night. I can feel it down there, throbbing with shame, threatening to vomit up the stairs and expose me for what I am, a lazy person with a messy basement.
My basement is all the things that I don't want you to know, that I want to keep covered and out of your sight. I want you to see my living room and my dining room, my best selves, my most charming and evolved selves. But down there, down in the musty, smelly basement are the parts of me that make me embarrassed and sad. Down there are my easily hurt feelings, my adolescent heartbreaks, my public failures, the times I've tried to tell a joke and no one laughed. Down there are the unrequited loves, the left-out feelings, the times when I heard other girls talking about me in the bathroom, both in high school and at church not that long ago. The basement is where all the hidden parts are.
I don't know what it is for you. Maybe it's not your basement or your butt. But I think it's something, and I think you probably spend a lot of time covering it up and thinking about it in the middle of the night. And I think when you let someone into your life far enough to get a glimpse of it, at first you think you're going to pass out, and that that person is going to ruin your reputation as a good person by blabbering about your butt or your cabinets to everyone you know. But a second after that, I think you're going to realize that that person is your friend. Like really and truly, from Jesus, your friend.
That's why Annette's basement healed me so deeply. Her basement doesn't bother me one bit. It's messy and dirty and you have to wind your way through it like a corn maze, and it doesn't even put a dent in how much I love her and respect her and think she's smart. And apparently, against all odds, that's how she feels about me. That makes me feel both honest, like she's seen the very worst and there's nothing else to be exposed; and safe, like she's not going to leave or make fun of me. When you find those things coexisting peacefully in one friendship, I think you've got a good thing going there, and you should let them see your basement.