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Everyone lives with a certain amount of
‘mess’ in their lives – from an overflowing junk drawer to an unmade bed. But if you have more than two junk drawers (or an entire junk closet, basement or
garage), you could be a nascent hoarder.
How can you tell the simply
messy mom from the future reality TV show star?
The list below might help. These
are things that are traditionally ‘hoarded’ in the early stages of pathological
collecting. Let’s see if the shoe fits.
·
Old magazines, catalogues and newspapers
·
Things that ‘could’ be useful for making crafts
·
Clothes that ‘might’ be worn one day
·
Broken things
·
Freebies
I need a cure for incipient hoarderdom right now, and the
best cure I can think of is to watch the show Buried Alive. After watching
this show, many people end up throwing all their belongings out, in a visceral ‘reverse-hoarding’
reaction. That’s what can happen when people
see someone store bags of dirty diapers in their fridge and then use them to
make soup stock.
Very few people want to end up as a diaper-stock-making, wispy-haired
unwashed person sleeping on a roach-infested newspaper-stuffed mattress. Watching Buried
Alive is an extreme treatment, like skipping straight to the third ghost in
A Christmas Carol. You’ll get a dumpster the next day.
Of course my junk is completely normal.
I have only one junk drawer and it’s in my kitchen. My junk drawer helps me feel in control and
organized because I have an official place to put things – things that I
otherwise would leave lying around in piles, and while that might sound a tiny
bit OCD, it doesn’t mean I’m a hoarder.
My junk drawer is where I put all those leftover Ikea parts that
will one day turn out to be extremely important, but only after I throw them out, a classic Catch 22. But that still doesn’t make me a hoarder.
My junk drawer also contains things that my husband has
neglected, or refused, to fix, including some wanky stuff from his own ‘junk’ drawers. I’ve got a busted doorbell, 3 tassels that
fell off an expensive living room pillow, and a bobble head doll that needs a
massive dose of superglue if he ever hopes to bobble again.
This all feels normal to me, but I do have this little
problem with buttons that worries me. I
just can’t bring myself to throw them away.
I have to wonder what it all means.
Do I have a pathological attachment to things? Do I have what they call a “persistent difficulty discarding or parting
with possessions, regardless of their actual value”?
(I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that my
mother might read this and give me back all the useless stuff I’ve stored in her
attic for the past 20 years.)
The real answer to that question will come when I clean out
my junk drawer, which has recently reached ‘maximum engorgement’. If
only it were self-immolating in its last stages of life, like a phoenix; but
no, I have to clean it myself. If I don’t
clean it soon, I might as well give up and start acquiring a few dozen underfed
cats to stash in my basement.
My husband would be able to clean out our junk drawer in in
under an hour, but that’s because he would wait until I was away, then throw
everything out, even the loose change.
I need a full day
to properly sort, organize and obsess over every little thing I find. Nothing should go to waste. I don’t know if that’s hoarding, or just
normal Yankee behavior. Sometimes it’s
hard to tell the difference.
On the positive side, I’m almost positive that I don’t have a
serious hoarder problem because I recently threw out a dried up piece of
umbilical cord and three Walmart watches that needed their batteries
replaced. As it turns out, the batteries
cost more than the watches so this made a lot of sense. And who really needs a dried up piece of
umbilical cord? It’s not like it’s a button.
I take this as a sign that I can let go. Now, if I could just bring myself to part
with the bobble head doll I could call myself cured.
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