The thing growing in the closet

So far, I've spent the first week of 2015 trying to clean out a giant mess of mold in my closet. I would like to think of this as a metaphor. I would like to, but, there is, or was, a giant mess of mold in my closet; the real deal stuff, that I am extremely allergic to. We sealed the windows to shut out the drafty cold in our old house, and in the process we gave the spores of decay a place to fester and thrive amongst the overflow of boxes of memories and junk we failed to unpack. We didn't notice right away until it was climbing the walls and carpeting the outsides of our boxes of memories, and the illness had already set in.

It's really the perfect metaphor, isn't it?

The truth is, I have a lot of mold in my metaphorical closet, as well, that I hope to finally clean out this year. I want to unpack those long forgotten boxes of memories, good and bad, toss out the ones that I don't want or need any longer, air the newly emptied space out until I feel healthy and whole again. I feel like I have become a hoarder of things that have been detrimental to my psyche, and I am ready to call in the cleaning crew. I don't want to be insulated from the rest of the life that I could be living.

I'm going to write one of my books this year, and find someone to publish it. That is the sum total, along with the above closet cleaning, of my new year resolution. It's a big one, but I believe I am going to do it.