Unshelved by Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum
comic strip overdue media

Sunday, June 27, 2010

The weight of things

Two hold requests I just put in for the library, thanks to this weekend's 'Unshelved' book recommendation:

Stuff : compulsive hoarding and the meaning of things / Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee.

Buried in treasures : help for compulsive acquiring, saving, and hoarding / David F. Tolin, Randy O. Frost, Gail Steketee.
It's not idle curiosity. I have struggled with hoarding for years, going through periods of relative calm and cleanliness only after purges when things got so bad that I just had pathways. I hate having this. I know in my case it is 1) an expression of my obsessive compulsive disorder and 2) is my way of limiting contact with others and the emotional fallout of that in a controllable way, something I think I'm finally starting to outgrow a need for. On a scale of 1 (worst) to 10 (best) I'd put my house at about a 4 right now, not good enough for company but not severe.

I don't mention my hoarding much. One, I'm embarrassed by it, although it's much better than it used to be; medication helps. Two, it makes it sound like my life is totally fallen apart; oddly enough, that isn't the case. I'm quite functional in my professional life and emotionally I'm probably at the healthiest I've ever been in my life. But this is still a struggle for me, because it is so overwhelming to deal with once things get to a certain stage. After a purge, I can usually keep things on track for about a year or so, unless I have something like a physical illness come up or a particularly difficult schedule where I'm just dropping things on the sofa and heading to bed at night.

I'm hoping with the new job hours, I can devote a few hours a week to excavating and either getting rid of non-usable stuff or putting things I'd really like to keep in order. I'll be getting home 2-3 hours earlier a day, so that should help.

The funny thing is I rather like cleaning. It puts me in a good mood to put things in order at work or at my friends' house. It's only my own things that have emotional weight to them, where I feel bad if I throw out recyclables even though I don't have the means to do so (no car to take them across town, no recycling bins at the apartment complex), so I let them build up. That's an example.

I have had a friend who has watched my struggles with this over the last couple of decades. I remember he was flabbergasted by the fact that I was hanging onto pottery shards of dishes that belonged to my great-grandmother, and he finally got me to throw them out. In my mind, I had to keep a hold onto stuff to keep a hold on to her. It's like I couldn't remember her without something tangible there. I know that makes no real sense, but that's how I felt. On the other hand, when I was evicted years ago, I suddenly decided to leave my record collection behind (I had no turntable), including hard-to-replace albums, although he urged me to keep them, and I regret that decision often. It's like I had to do what would punish me the most, because I was a failure for not being able to keep the apartment after being laid off. I wasn't in a good emotional place then at all, understandably. I lost something precious and sentimental by anyone's standards--my grandmother's wedding ring--because I couldn't afford to get it back out of pawn. It's something I can never replace and although I myself would probably have never used it, it was a legacy. Just the thought of its loss makes me cry, and it did so a bit ago when I finally talked about it with some people who didn't really know me all that well, people I eat lunch with. Even though it happened six years ago, the pain was still very much there; I'd never dealt with it, never told a counselor, never told a soul how I felt other than my best friend.

Funny that it came up at just the same time I found out I had a chance to become more financially secure with the potential new job. The thing is, though, no matter how stable or good my finances are, I can't undo what was lost. What I can do, however, is use the opportunity to evaluate what is important to hang onto and what isn't. So wish me luck in my attempt to put a little more order to my life.

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