Do you keep doors open? Or do you close them, when you pass through?--Al

-- Al Schroeder (al.schroeder@nashville.com), April 09, 2000

Answers

For three months now I have been sailing the sea of self discovery using a diary I started just for that purpose. I wanted and want to know who I am, why I am, what I am and how I got to this point in life.

This is one of your questions that lets me take a survey of a sort and see what my score is.

I am Janus, looking forward and backward at the same time. I can't be what I am if I wasn't what I was. Complicated ? No more so than most humans, whether they are of the same bent or door closers.

In my diary, one time I am deep in memory and as I write it the trip through those times becomes rather self explanatory, now. Other times I am grousing about what baloney the politicians are wrapping in that greasy butcher paper, and any other thing I think is wrong.

Some doors behind me are half closed, my suicide attempt in 1987, the half shut door more or less shields me from the soul wrenching horrors I went through - and it is as if I am reading about someone else. My alcoholic hiatus in the haze of alcoholic thinking, doing the same damn thing over and over and expecting different results each time. The half open door mutes the misery.

Of course I realize that I could turn around and go back through those doors, but the door I am opening now draws me on toward peace and happiness. Do I understand me ? Not yet, but the me who is me is becoming more understandable to me - - - - thus the diary.

I have lived through the diary of the woman you referred to, her courage is certainly above and beyond the call of duty and she has my greatest admiration. We have been in contact, rather cautiously at first but I guess we began to get a feel that we had traveled down the same path and are living now through physical pain and began to talk realities. She is my friend, I love her.

-- Denver doug (ionoi@webtv.net), April 10, 2000.

My best friend (who died in 1986) once told me "Once I go through a door, I close it and never look back." I hadn't thought about that before, but realize that this is what I have done in my life too. I seem to live life fully in the moment, enjoying all there is to be enjoyed of whatever situation I'm in--school days, college, young married in cooperative nursery school (a world unto itself), new town/new involvements/new schools for the kids, LaLeche League, diving team, children's theatre, work, the Internet... Each has been lived fully with 100% involvement but there comes a time when I pass through that door onto something different. And I close the door.

I have a friend from the college/co op nursery rooms. We are still good friends, but our relationship seems to consist mostly of reliving past memories, an exercise which bores me very quickly. It seems we have no "present," only a "past," and that makes me sad because the past is gone and the door is closed.

My husband, on the other hand, never closes a door. He remembers the name of every person he ever met, every child he ever coached. It amazes me when he passes a 6 foot tall man on the street and tells me that the last time he saw that guy, he was in his PeeWee Little League team--how in the world did he recognize him, much less remember his name?

It's odd that the only doors I feel I've left open are the ones that have been firmly closed by others, or by fate.

-- Bev Sykes (basykes@dcn.davis.ca.us), April 10, 2000.

Well, I do what probably a great deal of everyone that opens doors ends up doing; Closing the painful doors and leaving wide open the ones that bring happiness.

-- Jen (invisiblegirl@kittymail.com), April 10, 2000.

I prefer to stay outdoors. Rooms are vastly overrated. And you can take that both literally and figuratively.

-- Hector Plasmic (hectorp@softdisk.com), April 10, 2000.

Maybe it is a matter of definition and its interpretation. What ever a door means to you may be productive for you to either open it or close it.

If you think of a door as a mile post on your path through life would you tear it down on your way past ?

If doors are like anchors around your neck then closure is right, perhaps.

One of the big problems is not necessarily doors, but trying to move forward while looking back, obsessed with what you should have done. Then, watch out for the mile posts.

-- Denver doug (ionoi@webtv.net), April 10, 2000.

I heard a saying "When one door closes another one opens, it's the hallways that kill you".I spent a long time in a hallway once, just before I met my husband, and it was really lonely. The past was closed and off limits to me and the future wasn't open yet. And there's always that ugly carpet!! I think I'd have to say that I like the idea of all the doors being open, even if I never plan to go through some of them again it's reassuring to me that I have that option.

-- kimnelles (kim@loupomanti.com), April 10, 2000.

I really like Anne Lindbergh, and have read her autobiography (in the form of published journals). When she spoke about her son's death, she said that death was, to her then, a *little* door. Something so simple that a child could open it, and enter. It didn't frighten her, she said, any longer: a little door.

-- Catherine Hines (hinesc@mindspring.com), April 11, 2000.