CLOSETS

Closets

I have a complicated relationship with closets.

When I came out at fourteen, I did not step gently into the light. I burned the doors down. There was no going back in after that, even if I had wanted to. Closets, for me, have never been about hiding. They have always been about deciding what stays in and what comes out.

At the end of every year, I clean out my closets.
Figuratively and literally.

Everything comes out.
I dust off a few skeletons. I shove a couple more back in.
Some things get folded neatly. Some things finally get admitted to the trash pile.

It is one of my favorite rituals. Not because I love organizing, I do not. But because it forces me to decide, what still fits, what never did and what I have been keeping simply because I paid good money for it, emotionally or otherwise. However, the methodical, sometimes obsessive placement of things in my home tells a more honest story.

Clearing space, physically and mentally, is how I reset for a new year. It is a quiet accomplishment layered on top of whatever chaos, progress, or sheer endurance the year required.

And this year required a lot.

Together with the board at ALCHEMIA Art Workshop, I helped turn something fragile into something real. After nearly twenty years in custom fabrication, building other people’s visions, I am now building my own work. That alone still feels like a plot twist I did not see coming.

Then there was Ottawa.

In November, I made a trip that resulted in an invitation to present my work at a Senate event. The focus will be on IPV and GBV prevention, focusing on the art and activism of Transformation of Dangerous Spaces. This was not a ceremonial nod. It was serious. It was considered. In my line of work, that matters.

By any reasonable metric, it is a grand achievement.

But here is the thing.
Grand has never been rare in my life.

I live big. I always have. Broad strokes, big life, big ideas, big feelings, big messes. And because I live like that, I accumulate things. Stories. Grief. Old versions of myself. Relationships that mattered once and now sit quietly, judging me from the back shelf.

I keep them because they were important. Because they shaped me. Because maybe, someday, they might be useful again.

Until they are not.

This year, one of the most important closets I opened was grief itself.

I joined a grief therapy program.

Not because something new had happened, but because too much old grief had never been properly dealt with. Loss layered on loss. Abandonments filed away instead of felt. Experiences that shaped me quietly, while I pretended they were under control.

What I did not expect was how directly that work has fed into my art.

Transformation of Dangerous Spaces did not come from theory or policy language. It came from lived grief. From understanding what happens when pain has nowhere to go. When it gets stored in the body. When it calcifies into silence, avoidance, or violence.

That grief is not mine alone. It is shared. And that is what mattered in Ottawa.

I did not walk into those meetings with a pitch deck and a performance. I walked in with truth. I spoke plainly about loss, responsibility, and the quiet failures that happen when we avoid hard emotional work. The MPs and Senators I met with did not respond to polish. They responded to recognition. To their own grief reflected back at them, without accusation.

That shared grief did the heavy lifting.

Back to the moral of the story…at some point, storage turns into clutter. And clutter turns into weight. And weight turns into an exhaustion I can no longer explain away.

So I am opening every door.

I look at the grief I keep revisiting like it might change. The misery I drag along out of loyalty. The past love I already mourned but refuse to stop inventorying. The letters left unanswered. The unanswered questions.

None of it is recyclable.
None of it is waiting to be repurposed.
It is detritus.

And detritus belongs in the trash. Not out of bitterness. Out of clarity.

So I clean out my closets.

I keep what still works.
I thank what once did.
And I let the rest go without a dramatic goodbye.

That is how we make room for what comes next.