Gayle writes:

My novel Self Storage just came out, so I've been thinking so much about what "self storage" means. How our selves can be so wrapped up in our things. How we often store ourselves away from the world, lock parts of ourselves up.

Such power of story! Welcome. And wow . . .
This one bit especially spoke to me as culture, because of something I was looking at in horrid fascination the other day -- so-called "Purity Balls" taking hold in the fundamentalist fringe. A Glamour magazine piece by Jennifer Baumgardner closes with almost the same phrasing and power of story you use above, except the soldiers she describes are patriarchs armed with heavy swords in the religious wars, locking up parts of their little girls to store them away from the world, and even from their own thoughts or knowledge of self:

When Lauren Wilson hit
adolescence, her father gave her a purity ring and a charm necklace with a tiny lock and key. Randy Wilson took the key, which he will hand over to her husband on their wedding day. The image of a locked area behind which a girl stores all of her messy desires until one day a man comes along with the key haunts me.
By the end of the ball, as I watch fathers
carrying out sleepy little girls with drooping tiaras and enveloping older girls with wraps, I want to take every one of those girls aside and whisper to them the real secret of womanhood: The key to any treasure you’ve got is held by one person — you.