Shuttered Up: What Blocks You From Knowing Yourself
When I begin coaching folks in transitioning careers, I ask them: “What brings you alive at work?” I often hear of its absence: the hours spent on minutiae, the meetings that feel meaningless, the movement between putting out fires and staring at the screen in listless boredom, and the feeling of one’s agency being eroded in large and small increments as managers give instructions and change them at whim. As we flit through these experiences—slides on a projector providing snapshots of workplace anomie—they search inside themselves, looking for the flint of meaning. An answer tumbles out: “I spend all day doing what I’m told; I no longer know what I want. I feel locked out of myself.”
Away from sessions, on neighborhood walks, I look at the houses I pass by. I study their doors and think about what they signify about the relationship between the self and the world. Memories from fieldwork pour in. I spent months watching life unfold at the thresholds of people's homes in the town where I worked. Folks opened their doors at dawn, bleary-eyed, squinting at the morning sun, surveying who was up and about. They lingered on their thresholds, drinking tea, opening newspapers, collecting bits of gossip from those passing by. The doors remained open until late in the night, as neighbors gathered on doorsteps, debating politics, singing lullabies, and rocking their babies to sleep.
On stoops and porches, the town’s social life played out its everyday dramas. I came to see that doors were not mere points of entry and exit. Flung wide open or partially shut, they provided clues—nuances read by knowing neighbors. Closed doors spoke volumes. Some raised concerns that drew those nearby to inquire about the occupants’ health. Others raised eyebrows about their choices to live life shuttered in. Recalling these interactions at the doorsteps, I mulled over the question: “What does it mean to be locked out of ourselves?”
The Bolted Door
Doors are portals between inner and outer spaces. They enable, at once, a separation from the world and a connection to it. As the sociologist Georg Simmel wrote, they reveal “how separating and connecting are only two sides of precisely the same act.” Doors provide access to a sense of enclosure when we need to withdraw from the world, and, at the same time, they hold open the possibility of reengaging with it. Describing the fluidity of this movement, Simmel reflected that it is absolutely essential for us to set ourselves a boundary, but with freedom, in such a way that we can also remove this boundary and place ourselves outside it.
What happens when a door gets locked and this fluidity of movement is blocked? What do we do when it’s not the world outside that gets shuttered out but the world within? What brings us to a place where that which is inaccessible to us is the deepest parts of ourselves?
To me, this speaks to the heart of alienation, of estrangement from oneself. I encounter this in coaching when people say that what brings them purpose feels hazy and hard to reach. I sense that it is not because they don’t know. It means that access to a vital part of the self is blocked.
Very often, this has to do with an unrealized longing—a side of ourselves that felt true to who we are yet was hard to share with the world. This could be a creative pursuit or a vocation that has been calling us but that we can’t step toward. It could be a way of being and relating. Sometimes, it is our own desires for connection, for empathy, for intimacy that we find hard to access. As we approach these longings, a voice inside our heads warns us to stay away. It feels too risky to approach, as though the most meaningful contents of our own homes are sources of danger that must remain shuttered up—even to us.
Yet, keeping the deepest parts of us sequestered from ourselves does not bring the reprieve we expect. A quiet unease builds over time. Often, it leaves us feeling lost in the world. The experience is not far from the anxiety of arriving at our own doors, fishing for the keys, and realizing, in a moment of panic, that we’ve locked ourselves out. Suddenly, the place we return to for replenishment is inaccessible, separated by a bolted door and a misplaced key. Unable to get in, we suddenly become strangers looking into our own home.
The Peephole
How do we overcome this barrier? While coaching, my clients and I become detectives, looking for the key. We search. We retrace our steps to the last place where that sense of self was found. We rummage through pockets, peek under doormats and flower pots. We place our eyes by the peephole, first and foremost to understand why we sequester parts of ourselves.
To think through this, I return to Simmel and his writings about the boundaries that form between inner and outer worlds. Coaching has shown me how these boundaries are erected as we share parts of ourselves and are met with resistance or indifference. Sometimes, we repeatedly take ourselves to people and experiences that reinforce our sense of being misunderstood. At other times, we withdraw, avoiding sharing ourselves altogether, thereby affirming our sense of aloneness and estrangement from others.
Over time, what felt unwelcome by the world also becomes unwelcome within. The boundary placed to temporarily protect that which was nascent, fragile, and in need of tending becomes fixed and hard to remove. The ossification of this boundary creates a barrier in two directions: we become unable to access aspects of ourselves that matter to us and are blocked from tapping into them to forge relationships, experience wonder, and connect with the world. These boundaries prevent us from seeing ourselves and being seen by the world.
The Reconfigured Boundary
Overcoming this impasse requires us to reimagine the relationship between the self and the world. I see two sides to this. The first is an outward movement. Sometimes, we need to look outside and turn to others to access the sense of safety that was lost. It means keeping company with those who draw out aspects of ourselves that we feel afraid to share.
Conversations with such people help us find our way back in. It happens in tiny moments: a wide-eyed instance of wonder, a turn of phrase that helps us see what we missed, a surge of laughter that bubbles as they name a shared foible and we look at them and realize they understand us. The relief of recognition, of knowing no explanation is needed. Suddenly, we feel something shift inside—a release of tension, a relaxation of effort. We find we are in safe company, and the door unlocks itself. Through a montage of these moments, a sense of belonging emerges, helping us restore the fluidity of movement between our inner and outer worlds.
The second part lies in recalibrating our relationship with boundaries to better navigate the porosity between interior and exterior spaces. It requires cultivating discernment about when and where it is safe to share the deeper reaches of ourselves, when to open and close the door, whom to welcome in, and at what pace to establish trust. Coaching has shown me that the more we gain dexterity in establishing boundaries—saying no to people and environments where we feel unseen and alienated—the easier it becomes to access ourselves. These boundaries set limits that liberate us.
Simmel writes that “the human being is the connecting creature who must always separate and cannot connect without separating.” For him, the limits formed by separating inner and outer worlds “find their significance and dignity only in that which the mobility of the door illustrates.” The door, he writes, represents the possibility, at any moment, of stepping out of the confines of isolated existence into freedom. This freedom, I find, is deepened when we tap into our capacity to share the parts of ourselves and our work that we once kept locked in.