I, too, am a hoarder. I hate to say it, but it's true. I'm a hoarder. I would have started this thread myself one of these days, had you not beat me to it. Ever since I was a kid my bedroom has been a disaster. I could never keep it clean. I've always had too much stuff and not enough space for it. Clothes have always been all over the floor. Toys were everywhere when I was a kid. I didn't know how to clean. It wasn't as simple as putting things back in their place when I was done with them. Not everything had a proper place. Often I was too tired and too busy to clean. I always had so much schoolwork to do. I didn't have the time to deal with the piles of crap everywhere.
It's only gotten worse over the years. I can hardly walk in here. I have to step over things. I step on things. There are papers all over the floor. There's just enough carpet showing over by the door to open it about half way. Currently, there's only a narrow path next to my bed.
At least I have a laundry hamper now. That keeps most of the clothes off the floor. It has two sections. I intended to use one half for dirty clothes and the other for things that had been worn but didn't need washing yet. Oh, but that didn't work out so well. I end up just throwing the clothes in either side or hanging them over the edge. Then I have to dig through them, either to find the stuff I can still wear, or to find the dirty clothes when I'm doing a load of laundry. So I pull things out of one side of the hamper and dump them in the other just so I can find the stuff at the bottom.
I can't really get into my dresser. I don't know what all is in it. I know the bottom two drawers are mostly stuff I haven't worn in a while, but I'm not sure exactly what. The top drawer is mainly socks and underwear. It's halfway open and overflowing. Socks are spilling out. I'll probably be able to match up quite a few oddball socks once I go through it. And there's a lot of other crap piled up on top of the open drawer. I have to stand back and lean over to reach in to get socks because there's too much crap on the floor.
I've got numeous boxes full of sh*t I don't know what to do with. More sh*t is piled on top. Things just get thrown all over the place because I don't have a clue what to do with any of it.
I can't sit at my desk. I sit hunched over on my bed in front of my laptop. It's killing my back. I've got tons of papers and random junk piled on top of it. I can't move the chair. There's too much sh*t all over the floor around it. I have a desktop computer that has had a broken monitor for about a year and I've yet to replace it, simply because I can't get in there to do it.
I badly need a new bed. It's old and the mattress is dipped in the middle and I can feel springs trying to poke at me even through the mattress topper. Unfortunately I can't get one right now because I have to clean first. My brother got new bedroom furniture two years ago and I haven't been able to because my room hasn't been clean enough to do it.
I hardly know where to start. Any time I try, that's all I do is start. I've been getting a little done in the past while, but we'll see how this goes. Every so often, when I do finally clean through my whole room, it doesn't stay clean too long anyway. It's such a horribly daunting task. Most of the time I'm too depressed to tackle it. I'm too tired, too busy, too stressed out and too unmotivated. Every now and then I get a little ambitious and get something done but I never have the time to finish. It gets messed up again before I get a chance to keep going. I always have good intentions when I do clean. I get off to a good start, sorting and trying to get organized, but then I get stuck. I'll slowly pick through things and decide what to throw out and what to do with the stuff I'm keeping.
I always end up with a lot of odds 'n' ends boxes. There's too much crap that doesn't get used, but is in decent condition. I can't just throw stuff like that out. Most of what gets thrown out are things that are broken, or just bits of garbage that missed the trash can. I can't throw out something that's usable, even if I don't have much use for it myself. I'd rather give it away. But then a lot of it is just crap that's not worth giving away anyway, or random things that might get used on occasion but just don't fit in with anything when I'm sorting.
I like to be environmentally friendly whenever possible and that makes cleaning even more of a challenge. I end up trying to salvage as much as I can for recycling. Almost every scrap of paper I find gets recycled. Most people would just dump it in the trash, but I feel guilty when I throw out recyclables. On a related note, I hate throwing out bottles of anything until they're as close to empty as possible. I'm not doing it to be frugal. I just don't like to waste the product. I have a stash of nearly empty bottles of lotion that I don't want to throw out until I squeeze out every last drop. I've got plenty of tube squeezers for this reason. But then I'll open a new one before using up any old ones because I'm too lazy and so they just sit there collecting dust.
Same goes for pretty much anything else in my room. There's way too much dust in here. I have to wear a dust mask when I clean because I stir up so much crap I just get all sneezy and have to stop. I've got an air purifier now, but I need to make some space for it. I try and avoid using disposable dust cloths, so I've got some washable microfibre cloths, but they're buried somewhere under the mess. I have to dig them out so I can wash them before I can use them again. I actually ended up just buying some more reusable cloths so I can still dust before I get around to washing the ones I have.
I've got a couple of juice boxes kicking around that I should have thrown out a long time ago but I never got around to it. My intent was to snip the tops so I could rinse them out and recycle but they've been there so long they're likely full of mold inside so I'll just end up throwing them out. Wouldn't be the first time that's happened.
It's disgusting how much garbage I find when I clean. It's not really an issue of being attached to the garbage, though. I might toss a kleenex into the garbage and not realize I missed, and then it gets kicked around somewhere and ends up buried under the bed or under the heap somewhere. Also, I'm diabetic and I use empty laundry detergent bottles for disposal of used needles and lancets. I never put the cap on until I fill up the bottle. I just leave it sitting there, open. Well, the cap usually gets lost somewhere in this hellhole and then I've got a bottle of sharps sitting on the floor, which inevitably ends up getting kicked over. And I've usually got a few of these bottles laying around before I uncover the caps and actually throw them in the garbage. So as I pick through all the crap, I wind up finding these used needles all over which have spilled out from the bottles. I mean, they're recapped. There's no danger of me stepping on something sharp, but it's still disgusting.
I tediously pick at all the little bits of crap on the floor and gradually uncover a small section of what used to be an off-white carpet. I never should have got a white carpet in here. It's mostly grey now. Whenever I manage to nearly clear a small area, I just shove whatever's left of the mess aside and add it to the part I haven't got to yet. Then I can vacuum a bit. There's so much hair ground into the carpet.
There's so much makeup ground into my pillow case. It's no wonder I have bad skin. I haven't changed my sheets in a while because I have to move the bed away from the wall to do that. There's too much sh*t underneath at the moment.
My clothes are all spilling out of my closet. Sometimes I'll end up rewashing things that were clean, but had fallen out and got dumped on the floor. When I do get around to cleaning my closet and dresser drawers, I usually manage to throw some things out, but only after I haven't worn them in a really long time. When I do decide to throw something out, or give it away if it's still good, I probably could have done so a lot sooner. There are always things I decide to hang on to a while longer, even when I doubt I'll wear them again. Sometimes I'll start to fill up a garbage bag with old clothes and then not finish so the bag just sits there for awhile before I get around to throwing it out or continuing to fill it. But then I have to dump it all out again and make sure I know what I've thrown out cause I get paranoid that something may have fallen into the bag by accident.
I've got boxes full of school work. I intend to keep all my textbooks, but I don't think I need my assignments or tests anymore. Course notes I'll probably keep. But I have to go through it all and that's grueling. I can't just grab a pile of paper and toss it, I have to know what I'm throwing out. I've got a stack of school work that's half crumpled because it's been kicked around the floor. It can probably all be recycled but I don't want to deal with it at the moment. A lot of stuff just gets pushed aside like that when I clean. Some things I can figure out what to do with right away, but much of it needs to be dealt with separately. I've got boxes full of old receipts and bank statements. I'm gonna have to go through all of that and shred it but I can't deal with it as I go. I'll just dump them in the box as I find them scattered around my room.
I also have a tendency to buy extras of things, just in case, or buy things I might use, but don't really need. Sometimes I buy things and they just get swallowed up by the black hole before I even use them. It's exciting when I'm cleaning and I find things that have been missing for ages. Sometimes I find things I didn't even know were missing.
As difficult as this all is to clean by myself, I can't let anyone help me. I do not want people touching my stuff. I like to do things on my own and I don't like when people try to force their help on me. Also, there's no space for another person in here. I have to pull things out of my room in order to work. I've got a lot of crap sitting in the hallway right now. Usually I pull stuff out, start cleaning and then it never makes it back into my room. But there's nowhere else for me to put it.
My mom has some hoarding issues too. Our whole house is a mess. Our piano has become a shelf. There are a bunch of boxes of crap just sitting on the couch. At one time there was even an old TV on the couch. There's an entire spare room that's full of boxes, stacked and spilling over. There's a tiny walkway in the middle but you still have to step over the things the cat has knocked over. We've got far too many newspapers. My mom refuses to get rid of them until she's gone through them. She just wants to glance through, maybe read a few things, and mainly, check the obituaries. Not that going to a funeral is an option months later, but just wanting to know you didn't miss finding out about someone's death makes sense. I don't blame her. I already said I have to know what I'm throwing out. My dad and brother, on the other hand, like to throw out everything they think is useless, sometimes without even having the decency to check with anybody else first. It causes a lot of tension in our house. I think my mom's sister is the same way. She won't let anybody in her house because it's such a mess. My mom has tried telling her she doesn't care because our house is a mess too. I have to wonder whether it's just as bad or maybe worse.
We're not quite as bad as the people you see on TV. There are still some livable parts of the house. I watch those shows sometimes and I'm stunned by how bad some people get and how much worse it could be. But at the same time, I can empathize. I can understand why it happens. It's not as simple as just cleaning up a mess. It's more than just clutter. It's psychological.
I even hoard things at work sometimes. I work in a store and it sickens me how much gets tossed in the garbage when it could be recycled. We're supposed to recycle the cellophane that a lot of the merchandise comes wrapped it. It seems either people don't know or don't care and they mix it in with all the garbage. When I'm unpacking stuff, I do whatever I can to keep the plastic separated and I dump it where it belongs. Apparently we're supposed to recycle hangers too, but when they first announced that it seemed nobody knew where they were supposed to go. And no one ever did find out because they still end up in the garbage. The cashiers throw out most of the hangers as people buy the clothing and we keep some now and then because we need some extras. But we never seem to have enough. I always try to keep a lot of them around because I hate throwing out plastic, and on top of that it drives me nuts when clothing gets hung up on the wrong type of hanger. Nobody else seems to care. They just toss all the extra hangers in the garbage and then we don't have enough and we have to use what we've got.
I often take microwavable lunches like soups or mac and cheese to work. I used to bring home the used containers because there was nowhere to recycle them. Unfortunately, I had a habit of forgetting about them and leaving them in my bag where they'd turn moldy so I often wound up throwing them out anyway. I've stopped bringing them home but I feel guilty throwing them out.
Anyways, I've ranted far too long. I've actually spent a few hours typing out this fricken essay here. Hours which may have been better spent doing something productive, but oh well. I think I've said more than enough on the topic. I can't believe I admitted to all of that, but I don't expect too many people to have the patience to read this anyway.
(I'd love to! 