How it began, kind of

Never being one with much talent to make a long story short, this blog thing is right up my alley. And have I got a story for you. It's about how our house evolved into having 3-foot pathways throughout, to going through all the stuff and reclaiming living space. It's about being the boarder of a hoarder, it's about being a borderline hoarder, it's about stuff. Lots and lots of stuff.

First of all, when I say hoarder, I am referring to a mass accumulation of things - just like the definition of the word says, and I in no means mean any disrespect or negative connotation with what I am writing about here. It's really simple - my parents have traveled the world a few times and brought home some very nice things from far away places. They once had three homes in which to spread it about, and they no longer do. So, an accumulation of stuff - without a doubt. Lacking space in which to keep it - most definitely. Indecisive on what to do with it - You betcha. That's what I mean by the word hoarder.

Secondly, and not to bore you with the details, a little history here on why we are in this situation - how we got here. It's not like anyone decided they couldn't throw away or give to charity, that's not it at all. Although I can see that we all have an issue with minimalist living, as in we seem to be the complete opposite, that is not how hoarding become evident to me. No, this is how it came to be...

My parents bought a place out in the sticks in the mid-1980's to come on vacation, which we did several times a year. I married a man who had grown up not too far from this place and although he had longed to go back, I said, "No way!" In fact, when I met him, that was his plan but I convinced him to stay. Then my dad got transferred kind of close to this place and my parents moved. I reconsidered. I hated being 1,500 miles away from my mom and dad, so exactly a year after they had done it in 1995, we packed up our stuff and two children and went that way too. Their vacation spot was too far for my dad to commute and it just so happens that the very place I hated as a teenager is the same distance between where my parents would be living and where my in-laws lived. So we worked out a deal with my parents and sold our house. We loaded up our furnishings from our first home and three years of marriage and headed south, to what would be our second home in life together, and a home that was also already furnished. In addition, my parents went from a five-bedroom house with an attic and a basement (where I grew up) to a two-bedroom condo in a high-rise, so of course they had more stuff than they knew what to do with twenty years ago.

Then, (almost done with the boring history part), after ten years of living in the house belonging to my parents, we built a house. A brand-new house has to have brand-new stuff, and why not when everyone is just dying to give you the credit to get it! I know now why not - we lost that house five years later when the economy crumbled. I actually don't know if we can attribute our losses to that or to my husband's accident resulting in him loosing an eye; they both happened at the exact same time - February 2008. At any rate, it happened, and we returned to the unoccupied house in June, 2010 with, you guessed it, our "new" stuff from our "new" house. In the meantime, my parents had also felt their finances tighten and since my dad was now retired, they decided to put their condo up for sale. The first thing their Realtor suggested was to de-clutter a bit, so out to the "spare house" went more stuff. So, at this point, we have the contents of about four homes in this one, twenty-five hundred square feet house. And then the bombshell - the condo sold and no, they were not reinvesting in real estate, so what to do with all this stuff became the burning question.

And burn some stuff we did, but nothing that would harm the environment, or our sensitive souls.

My parents had planned to head out west to the town where they grew up, became high-school sweethearts and got married over fifty years prior. They moved into yet another home they had, also furnished and brimming with stuff, an abundance of which had just been inherited from my grandparents passing. They kept a lot of stuff too. My mom mentioned looking into a storage unit for a lot of their stuff here and asked if I would help her find one that I would be willing to look after. The more I looked, the less it made sense to pay for a place to store stuff you really don't need to hold on to anyway. I mean, who needs three households of stuff when you only have one house? So we said, "Bring it here, we'll help you figure out what to do with everything!"

Four years later, well, let's just say I have learned a lot about hoarding and what a horrible decision-maker I have been. More importantly, I am learning to make decisions now, and not later. And perhaps most importantly, I would like to share what I am learning as well as my experience in case I can help another suffering from the same excessive saving of stuff syndrome as me.

"Because you just never know when you might need a wheel!" Anyone else see that Dr. Phil episode? I can totally identify.

Title undecided, imagine that!

At first I just thought my parents have a lot of stuff that they do not know what to do with, and I can relate, I have stuff too. And it's not exactly news to me either, I have been watching my parents collect more stuff than they discard for decades now, I just didn't think much of it. But for the past couple of years, I have been thinking a lot about it.

After unloading the final boxes on that fateful December day in 2012, my mom looked at me with a sad look on her face and said, "I'm so sorry." I smiled, shrugged my shoulders and said, "We'll figure it out," and then gave her a hug. A couple of days later, they left to go back west where they would make their home-base.

So there I was, figuring it out. 

Like the way everything else in my life has seemed to go lately, I did not figure it out and then master it. No, I had to do the mastering first and then I could see how it figured out. It was enlightening, however, to figure out along the way that for me, the problem is much more than having too much stuff. The problem has to do with how we all got here - the problem is I have a problem getting rid of stuff. So I looked up hoarding.

I discovered that hoarding has not so much to do with how much stuff a person has, but rather the ability to easily make decisions on what to keep, toss or donate, and then following through. I have definitely discovered that I find it difficult to decide these things. The number of self-storage places popping up tells me that many others experience this dilemma as well.

A book I checked out of the library called The Secret Lives of Hoarders by Matt Paxton, says that there is something off-kilter in the hoarder's brain that researchers don't fully understand, and that it starts small, then gets out of hand. I'm pretty sure my decision making skills about "stuff" started going awry when I was in high school and I kept letters in a scrapbook that my first boyfriend wrote to me. I continued to fill the pages with things like dried rose petals from flowers he had sent me, a concert ticket stub, and even a napkin from the fast-food restaurant we were at when he first communicated his feelings of love for me. I believe this was the beginning of my hoarding.

The author of this library book writes that hard-core hoarders go through an internal debate with every single item that crosses their path, and that to a hoarder, throwing away a link to an important occasion is unthinkable. Hoarders are also the ultimate recyclers who never get around to completing the cycle. They have intentions of helping someone in need with certain items but never get them to that "someone." A lot of times, an item just seems too useful for something to throw away. Like a sturdy cup from a gas station fountain soda, they can be useful for scooping sand or dog food (my favorite uses for them) and a hoarder just can't stand to throw it away because of it's potential usefulness. I bet you can't wait to hear about all the potentially useful items I come across. Me either!

Decisions... Decisions...

Not only can I relate to the "internal debate" thing, I can see how I have a problem making decisions that do not involve the word "later." At first, it seemed that my awareness of this increased my inability to decide. Like being aware of the problem increased the problem. But then I discovered that the problem was my focus on the problem.

Thinking, I can not make decisions well, or even, I need to learn to make decisions, emphasizes the problem and keeps me stuck. However, thinking more along the lines of, I am learning to make decisions well, or, I can become an effective decision-maker, one decision at a time, keeps my brain in the solution, and according to many professionals in the field of brain-science, this is extremely important. Some even say that lying to yourself may work - a "fake-it-till-you-make-it" sort of thing, and that saying to myself something like, I am a good decision maker, can actually help me to become a good decision maker.

Published in 2013, the American Psychiatric Association added Hoarding Disorder to the Fifth Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V). Related to Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD),  Hoarding Disorder is characterized by the persistent difficulty discarding or parting with possessions, regardless of the value others may attribute to these possessions. Excerpts from the fact sheet on Hoarding Disorder state, "For individuals who hoard, the quantity of their collected items sets them apart from people with normal collecting behaviors. They accumulate a large number of possessions that often fill up or clutter active living areas of the home or workplace to the extent that their intended use is no longer possible."

While many signs and effects of hoarding are apparent to me in my home, for years I have insisted that our situation is more likely due to circumstances and not a mental health issue. Perhaps it is time I re-phrase the lie I have been telling myself. For after all, Dr. Phil's definition of insanity seems to apply to my circumstances. So let us stop the insanity. Let us, anyone guilty of saving too much stuff, start the cycle going the opposite way. One item a day we can do this. We'll call it - The One Item A Day Dispersal.

So who's with me? We'll start on my favorite day of all days - tomorrow.