Artifacts of An Unused Life

It is purported that in Dante's Inferno, which I vaguely recall having read when I was an undergrad, a circle of Hell was reserved for hoarders condemned to an eternity of rolling enormous boulders representing the possessions with which they had unhealthy relationships during their lives. In an article on conquering clutter, David Dudley, a writer, who assisted his elderly parents in downsizing to prepare for a move to a smaller home, described the process of decluttering as a kind of "desperate guerrila campaign against a faceless enemy that had insinuated itself into every device and nook."

For several years now, I have likewise been at war with this faceless enemy in what has often seemed a futile battle in spite of my many trips to Goodwill and the Salvation Army. Since I did not completely declutter my house last year, I'm carrying over my one self-improvement goal for 2007 to rid myself of the clutter I have accumulated over a lifetime. I'm giving away all of my quilting fabric and quilt books as a good way to start.

Until recently, I didn't understand the nature of the enemy I was fighting. I bought so many books on how to declutter that they became part of the clutter. I attended seminars by professional organizers on ways to clear the clutter. Still, I needed to know why I had a near compulsion to collect things and why it was so difficult to let them go when they were no longer of any use.

In the early 1990s, a Smith College psychologist, Randy Frost, Ph.D., conducted a research study on pack rats like me. A pioneer in the field of compulsive hoarding, which is the most severe form of cluttering behavior, he estimated as many as 4 million hoarders nationwide with many more having "problematic cluttering behavior." He set about to study the mind of a clutterer and discovered major manifestations such as collecting useless possessions, cluttering living spaces to the point they become uninhabitable, and distress or inability to function in the midst of all the stuff. Well, that helps to explain why I spent a whole weekend recently reading a book and working on craft projects. It's hard to look at all the clutter! Better to read a good book and enjoy some ice cream.

Frost's studies revealed that the "syndrome" tends to run in families and suggested a possible genetic factor might be involved. He also found that it spans all incomes and is not just a Western phenomenon but exists around the world. Though Frost speculated that adults exhibiting such behavior were responding to childhood poverty, his studies did not bear that out. Instead, he discovered a different underlying issue--emotional deprivation and lack of warmth expressed in the family during adolescence. That seemed to make sense. In an effort to maintain an illusion of safety and comfort not experienced in childhood, hoarders fill up their physical space with things thus creating living spaces that are anything but safe and comforting--household pathways that become narrow, exits that become blocked.

I have come to understand why the objects I have used the least are the hardest to get rid of. As Frost explains, they are not objects at all but are symbols of never-tapped potential, artifacts of an unused life, plans for future projects never to be completed. In letting those things go, I must be willing to grieve the loss of untapped potential and move on. How do you grieve over potential never developed? Who might I have become had I tapped that potential?

Hoarding has been described as an evolutionary urge lodged deep in our genes to collect everything we can lay our hands on. Certainly, the survival of the fittest once favored the fellow who had the largest collection of rocks and sticks, but as David Dudley maintains, such hoarding no longer serves us well in an era of unprecedented access to consumer goods.

One professional organizer describes clutterers as people with a lot of interests. Some are notorious compilers of paper clutter. Others like me have craft hobbies and have collected a large backlog of unrealistic projects, supplies and materials they hope to get to "someday." I have scrapbooking supplies, hundreds of photos I have yet to organize, books on how to write my autobiography still unwritten, a room full of quilting supplies and fabric, plus boxes I have yet to unpack from my move 2 years ago from my 2 bedroom apartment to the house my daughter inherited.

During the 1970s, my then husband and I had a legitimate reason for renting a self-storage unit --our apartment had burned down and we needed a place to store what we could salvage from our possessions that the firemen had dumped onto a tennis court behind our building. According to David Dudley, self-storage facilities which were rare in the '70s now number 45,000 nationwide and represent nearly 2 billion square feet of rentable space. He noted that a quarter of homeowners with 2-car garages use them solely for storage and park in the driveway. Hoarders who have a voracious appetite for acquiring stuff and a fierce attachment to it once it is acquired will spend a lot of money renting spaces to hold all their stuff, even though the investment in monthly upkeep is usually greater than the value of the contents themselves. I don't have a 2-car garage and I live in a one-bedroom house so I will continue my trips to Goodwill and the Salvation Army in 2007. Yes, I am "chronically disorganized" at home but not yet in need psychological intervention. Someone, please call the psychiatrist for me if you ever hear that I plan to rent a self-storage unit.

Happy New Year!