as a kid i had a habit of accidentally locking myself into rooms - usually bathrooms, for some reason - and not being able to get myself out of them. my parents liked to recount one particular instance where i apparently spent up to half an hour stuck and howling inside our locked powder room during a large dinner party where nobody could hear me over the commotion of pots and pans and guests. my parents wound up having to break open the lock with a sledgehammer or some other exaggerated tool in order to get me out.
there was also the time i couldn’t get into my front door after school one day during the first grade. i had taken the bus home and stood on the front doorstep of our wooden blue-gray house, desperately needing to pee, jabbing the little metal key back and forth into the door knob and turning it over and over again to no avail. the door wouldn’t budge. overwhelmed by desperation i began to wet myself, warm tears trickling down my face at the same time that a stream flowed down the length of my thigh. i was grateful for the hedges which hid our house away from the main road so that our neighbors couldn’t see. by the time my mom turned into the driveway, her smiling face half-obscured by the steering wheel of our family’s chocolate toyota previa, i was exhausted and overwhelmed and unable to say more than two words to her.
ever since then i have regarded door locks with outsized respect and a tinge of fear, although i don’t think i’ve locked myself in or out of a place in over twenty years (admittedly, as an adult, i still stand fidgeting at door knobs longer than most others would require to open a door.) in my teens and early twenties i tried to diagnose my so-called ailment, toying with various explanations - perhaps i was spatially challenged, or slightly autistic, or suffered from a specific type of door-related anxiety. but somewhere along the winding road between my mid-twenties and mid-thirties, i let out a long exhale and settled comfortably into the idea that i, yuelian hong, am merely destined to be a lifetime lock-respecter.
If any of these experiences took place in Germany, I can relate! I studied abroad in Berlin, and my host family's door lock was somehow the most confusing lock I've ever used! I asked my host mother to demonstrate how after failing once, and I could sense the confusion and concern for me radiating off of her haha
I love stories of weird moments from people's childhoods! This is just such a peculiar and striking habit and i adore it.