Hoarding...not just on TV

blossomhill_2

Brighton_belle wrote: »

I think I can connect to past need to rescue items 'from being lonely' tied into my own past lonliness, but I have only just realised that as I type this.

Do you know the saying "don't mistake lonliness for love"? - seeing what you have typed has made me wonder if we sometimes mistake lonliness for (an irrational) love of things?

lostinrates

Grey queen, the builders need me to empty five rooms in the first instance!!! One in my kitchen, they are making me a temp. Kitchen( which has to be emptied so they can make a hle in the wall, thats where i had been putting stuff to make a temp kitchen, but they say, rightly, that brick dust will get every where. Then, the rom next to the temp kitchen. The other two rooms are my utility....the workng hub of the house! And a final room that is to be my kitchen when all this is done!

short_bird

GreyQueen wrote: »

This is another great blog.http://tetanusburger.blogspot.co.uk/

Be warned; as well as witty writing and clutter-from-hell it contains LOTS of CUTE PICTURES OF KITTENS.

I heart Tetanus Burger. But it gets absolutely heartbreaking when the authors are writing about their childhood.

ETA the traffic feed on the Hoarding Woes is really interesting, they'll be scratching their heads and wondering why the English are invading the site!

GreyQueen

blossomhill wrote: »

Do you know the saying "don't mistake lonliness for love"? - seeing what you have typed has made me wonder if we sometimes mistake lonliness for (an irrational) love of things?

Don Aslett's decluttering books are full of cartoons and sometimes a picture does really save a thousand words. There's a cartoon captioned Don't love anything that can't love you back and the cartoon is a cute kid and a cute doggie, looking very lovable.

I remember that when I catch myself saying I LOVE something. Actually, I love some people, and some animals, but I really mean that I like/ enjoy/ value/ covet certain things. It helps to be careful with the words we use, even with internal dialogues, as the words can shape our thoughts.

On that hoarding woes blog, the narrator is decluttering the second hoarded house from hell in the space of a couple of years. The first was his mother's home and the second his aunty's (they were sisters). On the earliest blogs from 2010 he is writing about how his mother's love of buying-and-selling deterioated into chronic hoarding and how she totally cut herself off from her family and spent her days huddled in a single chair in the centre of the cluttered house.

I could cry to think of it, although these are complete strangers' lives which he is being brave enough to share.

It's sobering to think of all those people (and hoarding seems to be a much commoner problem than ever realised) who are isolated with their piles of stuff and having their lives ruined.

lostinrates wrote: »

Grey queen, the builders need me to empty five rooms in the first instance!!! One in my kitchen, they are making me a temp. Kitchen( which has to be emptied so they can make a hle in the wall, thats where i had been putting stuff to make a temp kitchen, but they say, rightly, that brick dust will get every where. Then, the rom next to the temp kitchen. The other two rooms are my utility....the workng hub of the house! And a final room that is to be my kitchen when all this is done!

:eek: You are very brave, to buy a home in need of such work. I hope it goes as smoothly as possible and that you have the home of your dreams at the other end.

ETA short_bird, I found hoarding woes last week and when I appeared the first 2 times, it said Hitchin, the next time somewhere else, now it says Long Sutton, Hampshire. It's cracking me up as I'm in none of those places. I wonder how the software tracks your IP addresss it gets it so badly wrong with mine.

oldtractor

fossilized possums

short_bird

GQ, they have me bang to rights!

GreyQueen

short_bird wrote: »

GQ, they have me bang to rights!

He he, the Brits are all over that site at the mo, if you watch the traffic feed. I wonder if its MSE-ers or just co-incidental?

ETA, Brits win, all Brits but 1 from Tel Aviv and 1 from Paris.

Brighton_belle

blossomhill wrote: »

Do you know the saying "don't mistake lonliness for love"? - seeing what you have typed has made me wonder if we sometimes mistake lonliness for (an irrational) love of things?

No, I haven't heard that saying, though it sounds wise vis a vis relationships, being sure it is love as well as a love of absense of aloneless. So transferring that lonliness to a love of 'things' sounds a logical possibilty. Ah, we are such complex things we humans
I do think spending time untangling our relationship with things is very worth while and is of course the root of decluttering and simplifying our lives.
There are two separate strands - dealing with things we already own and the various difficulties in letting go of them and then secondly, starting a new page in our relationship with things we will come by in the future and being able to have far better control as to what we let in to our life and home, knnowing how hard it is to get rid of them again!

I do think a biggy is letting go of the 'it might be useful one day'.

Brighton_belle

Hey Grey lady - let's hear it for the shedfest!:T.
And doesn't it make you feel so good when you have these surges of umph and just sort a whole area like this. Shows how much clutter subtly weighs us down the rest of the time methinks.

lostinrates

We are on a roll. I got dh to part with four t shirts to add to the three pairs of trousers io am ditching from the laundry heap on the spare room bed. Plus, i have decide to get rid of some sheets i don't actually like but remind me of something nice. I don't need sheets i do not like. Someone else however might really benefit from them.