the vault

I think about vulnerability and intimacy a lot, mostly because I enjoy writing romance, but also mostly because those topics interest me on a personal level. (I can have two things be mostly, right? It adds up to more than 100 percent, but I don’t care. This is my blog.)

In books, I love the parts where the characters crack wide open their darkest fears and the most protected, fortified parts of themselves to let the other character see them for who they are, faults and all. Let the other character really know them and in so doing, they have to let that other person inside. They’re exposed. They have to allow someone else to hold them, or their deepest, most inner selves, trusting that their partner will keep them safe and cherished, rather than destroy them.

In that moment, when a character is brave enough to share with another, they create a connection not just physical, but on a soul-deep level. A soft, secure place for each other to land and face the big, wide world together.

That’s the good stuff.

I used to joke that my day job office (not the whole building, but my physical space within it that has four walls covered with framed photos and certificates) is The Vault. I hear a lot of secrets. I don’t share them. Enough said.

But I think I carry a vault inside myself that is not shared. Even with myself.

Secrets and truths buried down so deep, I never let them get out. In fact, I don’t even know if I have access to the combination of the safe. Once in a while, I get clues of how to access it—to follow bits and pieces of joy, here and there that lead to some exposé of who I really am. But honestly, I never get to the bottom of whatever it really is that I’m protecting deep down inside me. 

Maybe there is no bottom, I don’t know.

But I’m wondering—do we all have a vault like that inside? A place that’s so secret we don’t share it even with ourselves? And what kind of excavation party would it take to dig it out? To expose its secrets? Are they even worth revealing?

What if we pull a Geraldo Rivera and there’s nothing in that inner vault?

I think that’s my goal in writing—to search for the treasure in the vault I hide even from myself and document the journey. And to trust that vulnerability and intimacy aren’t as scary as they seem.