Every hoarder I've ever known is a tireless junk defender. Like the stuff is far more valuable and important than the interfering thieves who might take some of it.

Important news flash: I don't want your stuff. I can get my own.

-t is me wrt hoarders.

Good plan, Fred Pete, I will take that under advisement.

I hope that works out, Laura.

I am hardly an expert based on watching a TV show, but what the doctors on the show usually say is that the stuff has to do with control. For example, a woman's husband left her, and it was devastating, so now she gets a sense of control in her life from holding onto those things.

The really tragic ones, to me, are those with parents who did shit like literally burn their kids' stuff in front of them. The kids grow up to be adults who desperately cling to their stuff.

I'm trying not to own so much stuff I need extra storage, except for seasonal things and packing boxes. I have so many I can't see them, I edit the collection.

The really tragic ones, to me, are those with parents who did shit like literally burn their kids' stuff in front of them. The kids grow up to be adults who desperately cling to their stuff.

Hubby was raised military, they moved every couple of years, and all his stuff had to go into one packing crate. Everything else was dumped. When he stopped moving around, he didn't know how to get rid of stuff voluntarily, and he was just so happy to have a place to stay.

I was reading reviews of my apartment complex. Someone was complaining abut the noise of the helicopters and the sirens going past all the time. To the hospital that is directly across the street. That you can't fail to notice when you pull in.

Periodically we get people in Lindburgh Field's flight path who make the news with complaints about the noise of the planes and want flight paths changed. I get so irritated. They can't pretend they didn't know that's where the flight path was, but they want to foist it off on people who didn't sign up for it.

"You knew the farm with the smelly cows and the frequent large family get-togethers with all the kids on go-karts every Sunday, or the rifle range, or the airport runway was there when you bought the pretty McMansion in the new McMansion development, named after the Century-old oaks they bulldozed to build it, was there when you toured the open house. Caveat emptor."

I have a hoarding tendency (also a messing tendancy), and part of it is that I feel that the actual things have meaning- so both memorabilia, but also used things from the thrift store. I just had to stop buying old dishes that I felt sorry for! I mean, the set was getting broken up, they were lovely (I did only buy mid modern), and I thought about the people who gave them up and how they served that family. It is almost like the things themselves have feelings and I can take care of them.

If you feel like that about every single item, and not just midcentury pyrex and mikasa I can see where it would get really out of control and also impossible to help with.

I've had to combat my "I can fix this! I can totally make it work again!" gene. I can't stand looking at those photo colletions of abandoned and decayed places--I can't see the beauty there, I only see the waste. And my very strong compulsion to roll up my sleeves and wade in to rescue the gorgeous old house, or the frescoes on the crumbling wall, or the plasterwork on the peeling ceiling is difficult to resist, even in the miniature of "I can totally mend that chair leg!"