HOARDERS

Have you ever seen the show?
 Before bed, I have time for what I call Junk Food Television. Shows such as Hoarders, I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant, and Pawn Stars all fall into my Junk Food Television category.

I allow myself this strange pleasure every night.

Hoarders really bothers me. It makes me feel uncomfortable and it makes me take a second look at my own messy spots, and wonder:

Could I become a hoarder?

If I'm not careful, could this be me?

Also, is my husband a hoarder?

Unlike hoarders, I love to get rid of things. I am always selling, donating, or throwing things away. However, it seems that no matter how much I do, our belongings muliply like gremlins exposed to water after midnight.

Please don't age me by telling me you don't know what a gremlin is.

Like the hoarders I see on the TV show, I have a hard time with certain items. I tend to hang on to books or items that might be useful someday. But they are never useful.

This closet is the embarrassment of my house. It's a large storage closet. And it's full. And disorganized. Chaotic. I can't stand opening the door. To find something in here involves taking everything out. And then putting it back. Too much work.

I just threw out an old sewing machine that wasn't worth keeping. I had been keeping it -- for the day I learned to sew -- since 2005. I don't know the first thing about it.

My husband never throws away a computer part. We have boxes and boxes overflowing with wires and hard drives and modems and cables and a bunch of stuff I know nothing about. They're all tangled and impossible to find.

Cleaning my house is not on my list of favorite things to do. But I do it. I keep up with it using the filing card system. If I don't, I start to feel overwhelmed and don't know where to begin. My house is almost always passable on the cleaning front, but it takes a lot of discipline and self-direction to get it done. I am not a natural-born housekeeper.

So I wonder what triggers a person to hoard. If I'm honest with myself, I can see hoarding tendencies in both me and my husband, and even in our oldest daughter. I wonder if there are many, many people like us, who would hoard if not for the self-imposed structure and limitations. Or, are those self-imposed limitations the very thing that makes me NOT a hoarder at all...just a perfectionist?

I'll leave you with that thought, and I welcome your replies. I have to get back to cleaning my bathroom now. I stopped mid-chore to write this blog post. I'm a terrific procrastinator.