By Matt Clyburn

It’s difficult to put into words just how much I despise public bathrooms. It doesn’t take someone living with obsessive compulsive disorder like myself to tell you that these places are both literal and metaphorical repositories of human waste.

A quick trip to the bathroom, for me, quickly becomes a hellish journey to the psychiatrist’s office. It will take more than a few minutes to run through the rituals that’ll make this place clean enough to perform a decidedly unclean act.

Finally, I sit down. What a pleasure to have time to enjoy the scriptures that have been etched into the stall by my forefathers – truly biblical statements that highlight the wise and philosophical thoughts of modern humanity.

Toilet paper and trash litter the floors; everything is wet, no one knows why.

I spent most of my first two decades either resisting or working up the courage to enter public bathrooms. Now that I’ve embraced them as a necessary evil, it occurs to me that my avoidance of such a place is quite backwards.

The cleanest and most upstanding among us avoid these places like the plague, yet society’s figurative fecal matter will go in and trash the place – giving both the venue and its inhabitants a bad name while making the situation worse for the rest of us.

If only people like me controlled the turf in the public bathroom, if only we didn’t resist, we just might make a better place for everyone. Our resistance to serve as leaders and standard-bearers is precisely what qualifies us to participate in the process.

While I’ve been fighting my own private battle with public restrooms, I’ve also walked among the public as a political science student, an engaged employee of a great company in Hartford and an active member of my hometown community.

Despite encouragement from the people that see me embrace each of these roles, I spend a lot of time either resisting or working up the courage to enter the public policy and political arena. It occurs to me that, much like public bathrooms, my avoidance of the situation is quite backwards.

The cleanest and most upstanding among us avoid Washington like the plague, yet society’s figurative fecal matter will go in and trash the place – giving both the venue and its inhabitants a bad name while making the situation worse for the rest of us.

If only people like me controlled the turf in the political arena, if only we didn’t resist, we just might make a better place for everyone. Our resistance to serve as leaders and standard-bearers may be precisely what qualifies us to participate in the process.

If my observation is correct, then we must stop leaving public policy to those that would just as soon turn our nation’s capital into a toilet.