Varieties of Hoarding 12 comments

By Sara Zarr

We all have our own ways of relaxing. On a recent evening, mine was sacking out on the couch with a bowl of pistachios, a glass of wine, and season one of Hoarders.

If you aren't familiar, Hoarders is a reality show about people who compulsively collect and save things—rotten food, bags of new clothing with the tags still attached, issues of Consumer Reports from 1992, bits of string, scraps of paper, a chip off a broken tile.

Of course, I couldn't relax and watch the show until I'd first straightened up. I can't concentrate if there are shoes under the coffee table or the bed is unmade or there is unsorted mail within a three-room radius. Finally, everything in its place, I kicked back with the remote.

It started out as a great way to unwind. There's nothing more escapist than getting into the story of a life you would never, could never live. I watched from a curious (and sometimes disgusted) distance, as psychologists and professional organizers tried to save the show's subjects from eviction, divorce, and insanity.

Then, I began to feel anxious. Something deep within me reacted to these homes piled high with garbage and clothing and broken things. By the end of the third episode, I realized that I've always worried, however irrationally, that I'll one day be forced to live in shambles and confusion, in filth, in disorder.

Though the home I grew up in never came even close to looking like the homes of the hoarders, and though the particular pathology of hoarding did not touch our family, when I looked at the chaos on my TV screen I got the same feeling that I had growing up in an alcoholic home; a sense of being overwhelmed, everything out of control. Not knowing what to do or where to start.

There was a claustrophobia to my childhood. Physically, we had plenty of room, yet there was no real space or freedom to live, to feel at home and at peace. It was the opposite of sanctuary.

My husband has never understood what seem like out of proportion reactions, on my part, to little bits of what I guess is normal clutter—the shoes, the mail, a few dirty dishes on the counter. It's not that I'm what anyone could call a “neat freak,” but when things aren't in their places, I get anxious. I have that same feeling I had in childhood of things being, or threatening to be, out of my control, and I hate it.

The thing I don't know is this: Where do you draw the line? When does one pair of shoes under the coffee table become three and then ten and then all of the shoes? At some point, without intervention, a couple of days' worth of mail will become weeks of it. I can't help but think of Andrew Dubus III's The House of Sand and Fog, and the unspeakable tragedy catalyzed by one unopened piece of mail.

How do you discern the moment when normal living-your-life messiness becomes a problem?

These questions and anxieties sometimes plague me in the context of my faith, as well. Grace and love are flowing free. But there are also things you really shouldn't do. The line, if there is one, between a place of living free and forgiven, and the first little ledge of the slippery slope can worry me, because usually I can't see it. Or I question my ability or willingness to see it. Or maybe I'm not seeing it because it's not there.

Sometimes I'm sure my fears are all off-base. Sometimes I'm sure my fears are spot-on. Sometimes I lay awake wondering which version of my faith is the right one—the version that would not let the spiritual equivalent of one pair of shoes remain out of place, or the version that would let them pile up and sort of lovingly see them as part of who I am.

I suppose this is what makes rule-heavy, black and white, all-or-nothing religious practices so appealing to so many people. You are either doing it, or you're not. You get the checkmark or you don't. And if you get the checkmark, your house is in order and you don't have to worry about the camera crew knocking on your door, there to start shoveling out the shit.

The problem is this doesn't seem to be the faith that Jesus preaches. The Sermon on the Mount wipes all possibility of the black-and-white-checkmark version away. At the same time it demands so much more. And that makes me afraid of discarding certain beliefs, even if they are cluttering up my spiritual house. Though I don't like them, though I suspect they're not useful, I tend to hang on to certain versions of Christianity, just in case.

So I feel for these hoarders. Somewhere along the way they got lost about what things have value and what's just broken and leftover, shadows of needs they had and people they were, long since past.