A Personal Story about Hoarding
Updated: 5 hours ago
This was an essay I originally wrote for the B-2 issue of my zine (a PDF copy of which is provided below). While not as formal as I was hoping when I first thought about it two years ago, it feels good to just finally get it out of my system. I'm reposting it here in a more fleshed-out version that wouldn't fit in the zine format comfortably.
I’ve always had a problem with hoarding. It wasn't apparent when I was a kid since I was more limited in how much "stuff" I could accumulate but the instinct was still there. It could normally be passed off as collecting but most of what I collected were things that were seen by most as frivolous. These included theme park and shopping mall maps, takeout menus, Hard Rock Cafe pins, plus whatever odd little doo-dads struck my fancy. It was until I finally was able to get some real disposable income that I graduated into collecting actual physical media that most people do. Even then, it was simply just collecting but for many years, when the trouble really started, I had “collected” enough books to fill a regional public library. Never really read them save for a few, rather I just accumulated them.
By the time I finally got rid of them, I had amassed 5,000 individual books – not counting all of the eBooks I had on my Nook – and didn’t even have enough space to put them anywhere. There were so many, I had to place half of them into bankers boxes that lined my whole apartment, most of them collecting enough dust that I developed an allergy that caused me to break out in hives. It didn’t help that I also never cleaned my apartment, instead just opting to drink beer, watch YouTube videos, and not actually read the 5,000 books I owned. [1]
As mentioned before, this wasn’t exactly new to me since I had developed a similar habit with collecting CDs when I was in high school and college. The difference, of course, was that I actually listened to most of those with some regularity. DVDs and Blu-rays later on, but that was a little trickier since movies take time to watch and couldn’t be just thrown on when driving the car. “Collecting” had been with me for quite a while but the problem made itself truly apparent with these damn books.
The thing about hoarding, when you experience it in person, is that it’s primarily a compulsion not unlike having an addiction. [2] A lot of the time while I was hoarding those books wasn't just about buying and storing them but also spending time perusing websites for more books that I wanted to add to the library. The whole thing turned into a never-ending quest to grab as many books as I could get into my possession. My family was often baffled (and later distraught) by the ever-growing number of book boxes I was filling my apartment with. To them, it was a sickness but one I had to personally be responsible for curing.
To me, it was a habit that grew out of fear and turned into shame and guilt. [3] I was afraid of losing out forever on something that might be interesting or helpful (a lot of the books were reference books) and I would never get a chance to see it again. That’s how it was with the other physical media like the CDs or the DVDs. “Oh neat, I want to check this out,” I’d think, followed by “oh shit! I better get it now or I’ll never see it again!” The age of streaming was not around until I was out of college so everything was ephemeral as far as I know it.
But then streaming did come along and I found out that most of what I collected was not going to be gone forever. Of course, there’s a lot that went wrong with how the Streaming Era has developed since the late 2000s but the main driver of my fear was erased once I knew a lot of what I liked wasn’t just going to go Poof! and never return. There was always going to be somebody out there keeping it around somehow and one day providing the rest of us a chance to access it so we could have it too.
(Also: falling in love with somebody and wanting them much more than an unreasonable number of books might’ve had something to do with it too…) [4]
If you find yourself or a loved one having problems with hoarding, I'll provide a link to the National Alliance for Mental Illness that can provide better guidance and help. If you need to talk to someone, their number is 800-950-NAMI (6264) and are available between Monday-Friday, 10 a.m. – 10 p.m. EST.
Notes
[1] Part of what happened during this period of my life was undergoing severe depression and agoraphobia, which not only helped fuel the anxiety that led to me believing I needed all of those books (my fear was that all that information was going to just disappear in some kind of apocalyptic disaster, which I now realize was the depression fantasizing such scenarios...) but also made it difficult to keep up with regular everyday tasks like cleaning an apartment. I still suffer from this task anxiety but it's been tempered by having a great partner who holds me accountable.
[2] I don't make this statement flippantly, especially since I developed a heavy drinking habit during this time in my life, averaging a six-pack of high ABV beer a night at my worst. I was fortunate that a year of sobriety around 34 helped me get my drinking under control but I still have to be mindful of when, where, and how I engage with alcohol throughout the rest of my life. When I compare my hoarding to addiction, I'm drawing from the fact I would obsessively focus on what to buy, where I could buy, argue with myself on whether I should buy, run back to the store after spending an hour debating the pros and cons of buying that particular book. etc. For several years, that was my only passion in life - just getting books so I could load them into boxes that I rarely (if ever) opened again, out of the fear I would never get another chance to possess them. That's clearly not a healthy way to live...
[3] One of the common traits I understand about both hoarding and addiction from both reading and personal experience is that you also find yourself making a lot of justifications about why you're doing it and whether you actually have a problem. The internet happens to be filled with a lot of book obsessives out there, which made my situation a little more troublesome since I thought of myself like them. The difference, of course, is that a lot of those folks actually read the books they amassed and have some kind of thoughtful insight to the content. (I mostly just piled them up and moved onto the next one, a problem I noticed I regained in the past year with my ebook services...) When you read them, you find a lot of talk about "TBR" piles and concepts like tsundoku, sometimes so hyped up that it feels flippantly cutesy. For me, remembering Walter Benjamin's essay "Unpacking My Library" was my go-to comfort justification due to a superficial understanding what was actually going on:
[4] I'm actually underselling this point, since that was the moment the "spell" broke over me. Long and short was that I was giving an ultimatum: Them or the books. They loved me but living in a library was not how they wanted to go through life. I loved them so much - and still do - that I wanted to have them in my life far beyond any number of bankers boxes filled with moldy old books. This story, though, is a far larger and more complicated one than I wanted to present here and I'll leave that for another time.
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