What I Found (Hoarding), 2007, by Anonymous

From MemoryArchive

Who: Anonymous
What: Hoarding
When: 2007
Where:

What I Found

When you walk into my house, you might think, “Wow! This place is a fire hazard!” I am a pack rat. I keep everything, and I collect everything. Possibly, I am an undiagnosed hoarder. I differ, however, from many hoarders in that when the “stuff” starts to cause my world to crash down around me, I try to fight back. I work from room to room examining the contents, thinking about what to keep, what to donate to good will, and what to throw away. Thinking . . . thinking . . . thinking . . . Sometimes I just move stuff around from one room to another. As I move from room to room, I remember scenes from my childhood.

What I found in the kitchen:

• Six boxes and one bag of rice
• Six cake mixes and four cans frosting
• Eighteen boxes of jello/pudding mix
• Three boxes of Lipton tea bags (enough to make sixty-six pitchers of tea!)
• Ten boxes of cereal
• Twenty fruit cups
• Forty-two packages of 100 calorie snacks
• Thirteen jars/bottles of condiments
• Fourteen bags/boxes of pasta
• Twenty bags of family-size microwave popcorn

Hoarding is the acquisition of, and inability to discard, possessions that appear to be useless or of limited value. Compulsive hoarders often think, “This is too good to throw away.”

The kitchen was always a hot gathering spot. When my sister and I got off the school bus, the kitchen was always the first stop. My mom was a great cook and we always ate dinner together at the kitchen table. Homework? Kitchen table. Craft project? Kitchen table. I still remember playing too-long games of Monopoly there. I usually sold all my property cheap after an hour, so I rarely won. Spoons, however, I could play for hours. Our games consisted of four players. My mother usually did not play as our games were too rough for her tastes. My sisters and I had to watch carefully to ensure Dad didn’t put the spoons too close to his side of the table. My dad, my two sisters, and I eyeballed one another as we each chose one card from his or her stack. I crowded the table waiting for my sister to say go. Then the quiet madness commenced as we focused on collecting our cards. When I ran out of cards, I picked up the discard pile from the player on my left. The game continued until someone collected all four cards. At that point the player snatched or, with great stealth and secrecy, sneaked a spoon from the center. Once the first spoon was gone, anyone could fight over the other spoons whether he or she had four of a kind or not. The person who was too slow, unobservant, or weak to garner a spoon was out of the game. At our kitchen table, spoons was a full-contact sport. Winning demanded brute force or quiet deception. We didn’t own a spoon fit for company to use for eating because they were all bent every which way!

What I found in the living room:

• On the coffee table—ten books, three magazines, one newspaper, one calendar, twenty-six papers with interesting facts or stories I want to save, and one bill
• On the footstool—one magazine, one piece of mail, and one paper I want to save
• On the endtable—eleven books and twelve papers I want to save
• On the couch—two notebooks, three papers I want to save, and one bill
• On the floor—two more books

With hoarders, living spaces become so cluttered that they no longer function the way they were designed to function. Chairs and coffee tables become so buried there is no place to sit or put coffee mugs. Compulsive hoarders save books, magazines, papers, etc. thinking, “This is important information.”

As children, mom took us to the local library often. I perused every section, not just the children’s section. Mom never censored my book selections. Along with my Little House in the Big Woods, I could have chosen The Origin of Man or Palm Reading for Beginners, even though Mom was very religious and both of the latter books went against everything she believed. The children’s section was downstairs. In the center was a large round table with a cardboard box which drew me like a magnet. Inside the box were two guinea pigs. I grew up on a farm full of animals, but I had never seen guinea pigs before. Every week I was curious to see how the guinea pigs were doing, and every week I checked out new books. I was a book junkie, and my mother was my supplier.

What I found in the spare bedroom:

• One tub of entomology samples—butterflies and winged insects
• Three different calendars of events for local wildlife/conservations areas
• One personal planner—open, with visits scheduled to above areas
• Sixty-eight pamphlets, posters, etc. on plants, animals, habitats, etc. partially filed, partially stuffed into one large file box and partially scattered across the bed (I am going through them trying to file them)
• One conservation frontiers leader’s guide
• Four pages notes from 4-H conservation frontiers meetings

Hoarders spend lots of time “churning”—moving items from one pile to another but never actually throwing anything away or creating a file system that is consistent or effective. Hoarders hang on to everything thinking, “I will need this later.”

My dad took my sister and me with him any time he went fishing or mushroom hunting. He taught us to hunt night crawlers in the soft summer rain. “Never try to grab them when your flashlight is shining right on them.” He taught us to fish with cane poles, fancy rod and reels, trout lines, and nets. He taught us the secrets to using stink bait, green worms, clicking crawdads, beef hotdogs, grasshoppers, minnows, or jigs. He tried to teach us how to hear and smell morel mushrooms popping their wrinkly heads out of mossy soil. I never quite mastered this lesson. “The only good snake is a dead snake!” My mother tempered this particular teaching by exalting the benefits snakes bring to farmers. Mom also made sure we could recognize the common non-poisonous snakes, often stopping our car in the middle of the gravel road to let a black snake rouse itself from its sunning enough to slither out of harm’s way.

What I found in all the clutter:

• Memories of home
• Laughter
• Family
• Overflowing love

Hoarding and Saving Symptoms are found in 18% to 42% of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder patients. But most people who hoard will also exhibit OCD symptoms. Less than 1% of the population hoards.

Am I a hoarder? Maybe the clutter reflects my desire to remember the nurturing I received as a child. I can walk through every room in my house, even in the dark. I can sit in almost all my chairs, and my kitchen counters are clean and clear of clutter. Maybe I am a high-functioning hoarder. Maybe I am at home in the clutter. Maybe I’m happy with what I found in all the clutter. Maybe I won’t throw it all out after all . . . just in case.