When I began living in Maine, I noticed that the state itself has a very large obsession with Gnomes. I made the mistake of telling my mother I thought that they were cute and suddenly I have a gnome army which makes this collection pale in comparison what gnomes I left at home. Personally, I only wanted to bee and pumpkin ones because I love Halloween and I adore bees. However, these gnomes have grown on me, and I catch myself wondering if I can find others that are just as charming. I used to draw gnomes like this in middle school and high school, so they have a very nostalgic feel for me. Do I need them? No. Do they serve a purpose? Besides the tea and cup in one gnome, no. Well actually the pumpkin one is a candle holder, but I don’t have candles, I just wanted to gnome. They serve no purpose other than having me happy. Thankfully though I can keep them in places that add charm and also, they are easy to clean and move around so they don’t take up much space and it reminds me of home. If anything, the only thing I get scared to clean is the teapot and cup since I have yet to use them because I’m worried, I won’t clean it properly or break it, I have a very bad tendency to not clean fragile things (such as my mother’s fine China) because I am freaked out that if I touch it, I’ll break it. I am slowly getting over my fear, however, just don’t hand things to me because I will get jittery, and I might drop it.

One thing I have a rather significant amount of is open tabs, specifically on my phone. At the time of writing this, I have 191 tabs open on my phone, plus a separate group of 11 tabs. I tend to use Safari on my phone as a way to keep track of things I want to look at later. I will often search for something that I want to do or read or watch at a later time with the intention of going back to the tab to do whatever it was. The issue is that I don’t go back to look at my tabs very often, so I keep adding new tabs without closing old ones, causing them to pile up.

I don’t know if this would be considered hoarding. I could argue that this isn’t a form of hoarding because they aren’t necessarily in a place they shouldn’t be, and they aren’t really causing any problems. An argument that this is a form of hoarding is that there is some amount of distress associated with getting rid of tabs. I hesitate to just close them all because they are things that, at one point, I deemed important or relevant, and they may still be useful to me, if not immediately, at least at some point in the future. And I do find myself going back to things often enough that I can’t justify closing them all. 

The existence of this collection is at least somewhat due to a lack of a cleaning routine because I rarely take the time to go through all of them. I keep telling myself that I will go through and decide which tabs are relevant and which ones are not, but it has yet to happen on a large scale, although I have made several attempts to do this on a small scale. The existence of this collection could also be said to be the result of a cleaning routine, a cleaning of thoughts from my brain. As I said before, I will quickly search for something that I want to look for when I get a chance, as a way to get the thought out of my head and somewhere else. 

Perhaps this will be the motivation I need to finally do it.

            

Examine the items in your immediate environment. Are there any particular things that you seem to have a significant amount of? (Include photos if possible!) Could someone make the argument that this is a form of hoarding? Are the existence of these items the result of a lack of cleaning routines, or is there a more compelling explanation?

I want to start off my blog post with getting the most burning thing off of my chest first, which is the DSM definition of “Hoarding Disorder.” The last of their criteria, in particular, is important to me:

F. The hoarding is not better explained by the symptoms of another mental disorder (e.g.,
obsessions in obsessive-compulsive disorder, decreased energy in major depressive
disorder, delusions in schizophrenia or another psychotic disorder, cognitive deficits in
major neurocognitive disorder, restricted interests in autism spectrum disorder).

I have a very silly brain. I’ve been diagnosed with OCD (not OCPD, which is associated with “neatness” and “perfectionism,”) and have had with me many obsessions throughout my short life; I’ve been diagnosed with major depressive disorder and bipolar type II, so I’ve had many periods where I have severely decreased energy; I’ve been diagnosed with the full scale of ADHD (both ADD and HD), so I certainly am not short of cognitive deficits (though I am short); and to top it all off, I’ve been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (with the most problematic terming they could have given it, “High Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder, Formerly Known As Asperger Syndrome”), so my interests may indeed be quite restricted at times.

With this all in mind (pun intended), definitionally, I am essentially incapable of exhibiting Hoarding Disorder, yet have plenty of comorbid hoarding “behaviors.” Weird how that works.

In terms of how I see myself exhibiting these behaviors, looking around my room I can immediately gauge 4 of my collections:

1) My playing cards,           2) A fraction of my legos,     3) My books,                     4) The boxes from all of my family’s Apple devices

I call them collections because yes, I went out and collected them, but the term also implies a certain level of intention and sentiment. These items are important to me and contrary to the idea that they are the result of “lack of cleaning routines,” are curated and handled with care as to keep them clean and/or in good condition. However, if I had to rank them from least to most “hoarding like,” it would probably be as follows:

1) My books – this collection contains vast amounts of knowledge, information, and creativity, and can be shared for generations, but at the end of the day, most of the time they will just be piles of paper and ink sitting on my shelf.

2) My legos – each one shows a sense of accomplishment and each one is unique and took much time and effort to create, and their uniqueness comes with a variation of functions, but will have significantly less “future use” than the books, alongside the devastation that plastics have on the environment.

3) My playing cards – similarly to my books, most of the time they will just be piles of paper and ink sitting on my shelf. While each of the decks carries a unique art style to it, and collecting them as pieces of art is massively what has drawn me to them, all of the decks serve the same functional purpose. Because of this functional similarity, the collection feels more “excessive” to me.

4) My Apple boxes – these are, by most standards, considered to be waste. They are simply the packaging used to ship, protect, and present the products inside of them, and once those products have been taken out, they are just empty packaging waiting to be tossed. I’ve held on to them because of the sentiment they hold with them – getting an Apple product is always a big deal, they’re not cheap and they go out of their way to make it look fancy. I enjoy having a reminder of that, but of the 4 collections I’ve shown, it is the closest to what I would consider “pure garbage piling up.”

For as long as I can remember I have been obsessed with nature. My childhood hero was Sir David Attenborough and I thought about nature basically all the time, which is why I became vegetarian at such a young age. When I was seven or eight I started to get into nature books. Encyclopedias and field guides entitled Birds of North America or Mammals of Southeast Asia. I eventually started to amass quite a large collection of them. Fast forward 13 years later and I still have most of the books from then. I have even replaced several books that I used so much they fell apart. 

The argument for me hoarding them is mixed. For one I do (did) use them quite often, everyday I took them to school, on vacation, everywhere, but more recently I haven’t been looking at them, they just sit on my bookshelf untouched. Many of them I have only read a few pages. I go back to them occasionally, but nowhere near the volume I once was. I have downsized quite a lot with all the moves I have done in the past couple of years, but my nature books are one of the only objects that I can say I have a collection of and have reservations about giving up. Clinically my nature books collection I would not describe ad hoarding. They are in the “correct” place, they’re organized, they’re not taking over anything, etc. They just exist as part of my room, my childhood and as a source of knowledge to look back at. I do keep them organized along with the rest of my belongings possibly because I feel like I have little control over my life and keeping my space where I live neat is just a way to have a little control. It does affect my mood when the space I am in is disorganized or out is not in the order I’m used to. 

To be honest I’m not much of a materialistic person and I don’t buy that much so I did struggle a lot to find something that fit into a significant amount of. 

Examine the items in your immediate environment. Are there any particular things that you seem to have a significant amount of? (Include photos if possible!) Could someone make the argument that this is a form of hoarding? Are the existence of these items the result of a lack of cleaning routines, or is there a more compelling explanation?

Readings from this week include:

American Psychiatric Association. 2013. “Hoarding Disorder.” DSM-V. Washington, DC.

Herring, Scott. “Collyer Curiosa.” In The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture, 19–50. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.

Martens, Lydia. “The Visible and the Invisible: (De)Regulation in Contemporary Cleaning Practices.” In Dirt: New Geographies of Cleanliness and Contamination, edited by Ben Campkin and Rosie Cox. London: I.B. Tauris, 2007, 34–48.