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Comments for "Hoarding from the Inside Out: How Hoarders Think"

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One Response to “Hoarding from the Inside Out: How Hoarders Think”

1. Samantha Says:
   

   I get tired of reading about the precious, precious feelings and delicate thought processes of hoarders. I mean, just how crazy are they? Am I really supposed to believe that a person who is sane in every other way cannot throw out a used paper napkin? I just don't buy it. I really don't. But I used to.

   I didn't know what hoarding was when I met my future husband. He was in the midst of moving from one farm to another, and as a city kid, everything I saw and did to help him was brand new to me.

   After we were married, I spent years, every evening and every weekend, getting his worthless crap organized. Didn't throw anything out, of course. My husband couldn't stand it, of course, so he moved us 19 times in two years - all around the country. This way, he could touch his precious, worthless crap every single day. Alone, we lifted large boxes into trucks and off of trucks. Into mini-storages and out of mini-storages. While other people were making money, making friends, going to school, going on picnics, reading books and sleeping, I was loading and unloading the same mouse-eaten "Collier's" magazines into and out of venues. Forty womens' winter coats. Two hundred too-small shirts. Plastic forks. Hundreds of little thingamabobs that belonged on something, somewhere. Small radios, three huge tractors, doors found in a dumpster. Oh, and let's not forget the long winter he bought at least one "vintage" suitcase on e-Bay every day. Every day.

   When he discovered a mini-storage next to a filthy motel in Arizona, he moved a tenth of his crap into two of them and sat among and stroked all of his worthless crap. For two weeks, his life was perfect.

   Best of all, he hoarded his money - so I did all of this on my dime. I had to put everything on a credit card, because I had to devote my life to assisting his hoarding. I picked up little jobs whenever he calmed down for a few weeks.

   Twenty years later, my beautiful legs are roped with veins, my hands look like a hard-working man's hands, my back is ruined and I take six medications every morning - one, of course, for depression. I have no savings, no profession - just twenty years' experience lifting and hauling filthy, worhtless crap. I've never said anything so soap-opera-ish in my life, but hoarding has ruined my life. I often think of that line in "Guess Whose Coming to Dinner": "Not until your entire generation has lain down and died will you be off my back." My life will be devoted to this idiotic hoarding until my husband is dead.

   Hoarding destroyed my physical health, my mental health, my finances and my once-good looks.

   And he is the poor darling with the disorder around which we have to tip-toe.

   Has anyone else ever noticed that these people destroy everything they touch? They store their belongings so carelessly that eventually tables warp, blankets become moth-eaten; mouses eat magazines.

   Like his other worthless belongings, the hoarder's caregiver is eventually destroyed.

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