Have you ever been punched by a drawer?

As of late, my boyfriend has taken to leaving the drawers and cabinets open after he uses them. The best part is that he doesn't even notice that he does it until I walk into the kitchen and almost punch myself in the gut with a drawer or hit my head on a cabinet door. Before I started this class I just thought he was just forgetting to close them because he got distracted by what he was doing, but I'm beginning to see that this is actually a body practice of his.

Now, he hasn't always had this body practice because he has just started doing this in the recent months and has not done it once in the past year. We've been living together now for a while, so it is not just something that I haven't noticed before because we weren't living together. So this made me think that he has obviously just recently learned this body practice, which, interestingly enough, goes against the norms of society. I am pretty sure that society instills the body practice of closing things after we get what we want out of them in all of us subjects from a pretty young age.

After coming home for this class last week and finding one of the kitchen drawers open, I begin to think about why he has this new body practice and what was keeping his docile body from working and closing those freaking drawers! That's when it hit me that this was his subconscious' way of acting out on his own body. His subconscious obviously is upset about something and therefore is betraying his docile body by creating this new body practice of not closing drawers or cabinets. This is obviously a hysteria in which he is acting out on his body because his subconscious feels that there is something in his life in which he doesn't have closure with, hence the leaving drawers and cabinets open. Luckily, this is a hysteria that is, fairly, harmless, unlike the hysterias that Susan Bordo talks about in which the person acts out on their own body by creating a harmful new body practice.

Now, I was pretty proud of myself when I thought of that because at least I knew what was causing him to do this new body practice, but then I realized that I have no way of making it stop. This body practice of leaving drawers and cabinets open is almost a pursuit without terminus because his conscious self either does not notice or is ignoring this lack of closure in some aspect of his life. Without bringing the lack of closure to his conscious, his subconscious will continue to have him act out on his own body. So, unless I can figure out what in his life needs closure I guess this is one body practice that I will just have to get used to.