Dec 5, 2008

Hoarding Disorder

Well, this is my second post dealing with compulsive hoarding, and as I do more and more research, it’s amazing how much this condition has affected me without me even knowing it half the time. It’s amazing how you can see life through a “lens” of a sort, where you think that the way you think is just “normal”, when in fact it’s anything but. I have since learned that many of the thought habits and patterns I have developed have reeked of hoarding disorder and I never would have detected it, had I not started doing research on some of the symptoms of compulsive hoarding.

One of the most tell-tale symptoms (for me, anyway) is when you keep things that have little value, but in your mind you have trumped them up to have a great amount of value, even though everyone else can see that they’re nothing but junk. Or, you’ll begin accumulating certain things, claiming that you’re building a “collection” that you may believe may be “worth something someday”. Most of the stuff I ended up accumulating, man, it would be hard to find a buyer anywhere for that crap. I actually have a Hershey bar wrapper collection from the 1980’s. I have an Altoids tin collection. I had a collection of melted VCR tapes from when I worked in a videocassette production place…I’m not kidding you. By the way, I finally got the guts to throw those videocassettes away. All of this stuff is crap, and yet I would just collect it and collect it like it was gaining in value every year or something. The truth is, all it was doing was cluttering up my house and my mind.

I even had this stupid habit of keeping old pens that didn’t write anymore. Yep, I would just have a desk full of pens without caps that had dried up completely or just barely wrote at all. What did I think was going to happen? Was I expecting some kind of supernatural change? Were the pens going to resurrect one day and all of a sudden begin to start magically flowing with ink again? Freakin-A. I guess what I’m trying to say with all this is that hoarding disorder can cause you to see things in a distorted manner, and you don’t even realize that your perspective has been skewed.

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