The Things We Keep

I am a recovered hoarder.  Ok, fine, recovering hoarder.  Since a young age, I have imbued inanimate objects with life, personality, and significance beyond their molecular or monetary value.  I remember as a young girl finding a piece of thread in my room; I mean literally a piece of navy thread.  Perhaps it had come off of my comforter, or my school uniform?  Rather than toss it in the trash, I found an old small box, filled it with cotton balls, and created a little “home” for my new friend—the thread—and kept it on my bedside table.  I don’t remember what ultimately happened to it, but I am proud to report that I do not still have it.  That said I have an admittedly hard time letting go of the tangible evidence of my life.  I want to trace the “Y” carved into the old New York subway token; feel the worn tufts of fur on my first teddy “bear” (which is really a kangaroo); wear my high school team jacket; see just how small my child’s Crocs were at age 18 months.  Or at least I want the option, because in fact I never do those things (although all of these items are currently in my closet). 

I’ve managed to keep this proclivity in relative check.  I have never had a compulsion to buy things I don’t need (much though my husband might dispute that…).  I don’t believe my house is significantly more cluttered than others who have young kids.  I have never actually become “buried alive” as the TLC show on hoarding dramatically describes.  But I get how it could happen.  I understand what drives the impulse to surround ourselves with proof of life, and how under certain circumstances it could spin out of control.  I admit to having said out loud at some point “well, I might actually need these” when referring to a random assortment of hundreds of paper cocktail napkins I had stored (no, I won’t), and have felt my heart ache at the thought of putting an old Pottery Barn crib bumper in the “donation” pile (even though due to safety concerns it was never even on the crib at the same time a baby slept there).

In preparation for moving houses a few years ago, I committed to cleansing my home of excess.  Going forward I would live like the Amish.  I would have only the clothes that I wear on a regular basis in my closet.  I would have only the toys that are currently in favor.  If a piece of furniture didn’t fit in the new house right now, I wasn’t going to keep it with the idea that someday it might.  Being the consummate preparer, in advance of the move I watched episode after episode of “Hoarding: Buried Alive” to remind myself how bad things could get.  I read “Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things” (by Gail Steketee), a psychological exploration of what drives people to hoard.  I hired two friends who are ridiculously organized to help me sell and donate anything I didn’t want to bring to the new house, and weed out as I unpacked in case anything slipped by.  (Fact:  if you ever want to cure yourself of a tendency to hoard, hold a yard sale and observe the die-hards who show up early.  I actually found myself, in a moment of paternalism, refusing to sell an egg-poaching pan to an individual I was certain would not be poaching any eggs.)  And I found it was true what they say in the books and on the shows: when you realize you don’t need something—when you realize you are saving it solely out of fear that letting go of the “thing” will cause you to lose the experience behind it—the weight that is lifted is more tangible that the item itself.  Now, whenever I find myself making piles of the kids’ schoolwork I can’t part with, or catch myself putting something into the back of a closet or under my bed so I don’t have to decide what to do with it, I channel that lightness; that feeling of total liberation that comes from saying: “Goodbye; I don’t need you, you ‘thing’, to demonstrate that my life has actually happened.  My experiences exist in me, in real-time, even without you as a reference point.”  (I recognize the irony of speaking directly to an object that I am trying to de-personify.)

It’s never easy to admit to relapse.  But here it goes: 

Right now, in the corner of my home office is the sweaty, blue, Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital singlet I wore running in the Boston Marathon this year, with all of the personalization I carefully added with a Sharpie the night before the race.  It is crumpled in a ball, in essentially the same spot I left it on April 15, nearly four months ago, when I finally got home, hours after the race was stopped in the wake of the terrorist attack.  I remember peeling it off, still so wet and cold, wanting only to dissolve into tears in a hot shower.  It sits next to my “Runner’s Passport”, the packet of logistical information they give the runners before the race, which happened to have been left on the same file cabinet.  Until very recently the running shoes I wore that day sat by the bottom of the stairs directly outside my home office, exactly where I took them off on the way upstairs to my room.  Recently I debated whether to bring my shoes into the memorial set up in Copley Square, hearing that it would soon be dissembled and moved to an off-site location.  Not able to decide what to do, I instead moved them into the front hall closet, where they still sit.  My number…oh the coveted number (I can almost not bear to look at the photo I have of me picking it up before the race, smiling and unaware of what lay ahead).  I carefully removed it from the sweaty singlet (returning the shirt to its crumpled pile) and pinned it to my bulletin board, even though, like my childhood phone number, it’s a numerical sequence I doubt I could forget if I tried.  Leaning against the wall by the bulletin board is the poster my kids made for me, to cheer me at the finish that never was.  It miraculously survived, and is rolled up with care.  Our DVR still stores “The Boston Marathon”, my husband having thoughtfully set the recorder before he came into the city that day, so I could later watch the pre-race coverage of Hopkington and other race-related news.  I have never watched it.  He asked the other night if he could delete it and I simply shook my head no.

To be frank, I don’t notice these items when moving about my house; yet I know they are there.  And like the muscle strain aggravated from training that has sidelined me from physical activity this summer, and the stark line on the back of my right leg of once-burned-now-tanned skin where the strong sun hit the hem of my running pants for almost 26 miles, they are lingering reminders of April 15 with which I am not yet ready to part.  I suppose that I am not yet ready for the relief that might come by getting rid of them.  Or perhaps I know that there would be no such relief because these items really aren’t at all like too many paper cocktail napkins or an egg-poaching pan.  Any attempt, including this one, to define why they are significant will necessarily fail; their importance exists on a purely emotional and visceral level.  And although the brown line on my leg currently feels like a tattoo, I know that it will fade, most likely in exactly the right amount of time.  But that doesn’t mean I won’t be sorry on some level to realize one day that it is gone.  Because it’s possible to miss even reminders of hard days; to feel their absence.  At some point I am guessing that I will either wash or throw out my singlet, and at some point I will likely no longer be compelled to write about the marathon; it will be a distant memory, too many good (and bad) days having intervened.  But April 15 will remain woven into me, part of who I am in every present moment, a destructive day that has also made me better in many ways.  And as with all formative experiences, there’s no real rush to destroy the evidence.  Because this really isn't hoarding; it’s more like “holding” – and I think I, for one, do it for very different reasons.  For the same reasons I still have a bottle of my Grandma’s perfume, and every now and then, on both good and bad days, I just need a quick sniff.  A hug from a long time ago.  A hope that endings aren’t always permanent, and through some sort of “choose your own adventure” magic we can re-write the past.