a door to another world

My house has a new front door.
But let me explain.

My parents house got robbed a few months ago. Actually, 'robbed' is a bit too strong a word, cos nothing was taken. Someone got in through the front door, realised my mum was driving down the driveway, and made a speedy exit out the back. So my use of the verb 'to rob' is kind of misleading in this instance. Let's say they got 'broken into'. But I digress.

In response to this 'break in', my parents replaced all the locks. But it turns out that my ancient front door, while having a very sturdy lock, was not very sturdy itself and could easily be busted through. So they had to replace the whole door. When I heard about this on the phone, I was pretty disappointed. The key to our old front door was awesome - a big, gold, old fashioned looking thing. Like a key in a picture from a children's storybook. And I wasn't that pleased about having to give it up.

Despite the forewarning, I got a shock when I came home for the first time after that. It just didn't feel quite the same, entering my house through a different door. And it got me thinking about the symbolic nature of doors. They symbolise security ["behind locked doors"], opportunity ["one door closes, another one opens"], and refuge ["wolves at the door"]. They designate the spaces in our lives, and they allow us to move between them. And they're a good place to hang out during an earthquake, apparently.

I'm getting used to the new front door. I've stopped lifting my foot a little too high when I step over the threshold. The smell of varnish is slowly fading from the wood (I still notice it, though). But I haven't taken the old key off my key ring. To be honest, I'm not sure when I will. Is it "the key to my childhood", perhaps? I think that's taking the symbolism a little too far. Mostly, I just like the way it looks.

secrets

I'm a little bit obsessed with postsecret at the moment. It's a blog where people send in anonymous postcards with a secret written on one side - usually the picture side. They range from the silly and irreverent to the deeply personal and often confronting.

People confess to affairs, petty theft, lies, mistakes they've made, suicide attempts.
They also confess to random acts of kindness, decisions that have changed their lives for the better, fears about their futures.

It often worries me that there's no way of knowing who sends the postcards. I read one a few weeks ago that said "To the lady at the post office who liked my journal: it's full of suicide notes. You can have it when I'm gone." There's no way of knowing whether that person is still alive or not.

I sometimes feel bad for reading other people's secrets. Especially when they're so confronting. But that's kind of the point. The anonymity of the site means that people can express their deepest darkest secrets without fear of discovery. And there's something deeply theraputic about that. Why else do we keep diaries? Or write things on the back of toilet doors? And reading other people's secrets can be theraputic too. They can help you discover a secret you didn't know you had. Or were too afraid to express. Or just let you know you're not alone.

Anyway, I'm hooked.