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!