I'M NOT A HOARDER, DEAR; I'M A COLLECTOR...! BY SANDRA HARRIS.

I’M NOT A HOARDER, DEAR; I’M A COLLECTOR…!

BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

I’ve been watching a load of programmes about hoarders on YouTube lately, purely in the interests of research, you understand, and not just because I’m procrastinating and putting off writing things. I found the programmes wholly fascinating, anyway, and I wanted to share some of my observations with you and see what you thought.

Firstly, it’s kind of like car crash TV, isn’t it? What you’re looking at is truly awful and disturbing, but you can’t look away. What’s more, you don’t want to look away, because what you’re watching is so compulsive. Addictive, even. I could no more skip or miss the outcome of a particular hoarding show than I could eat a banana without gagging at the squishy brown bits.

Also, if you’re in any way inclined to hold onto too much shit yourself (books, ahem, my own personal downfall! Oh, and Victorian dolls…), these shows make you feel better about your own hoarding habits. I never know if that’s a good thing or not. I do know that my daughter, who watches these shows with me, has a frantic clear-out of her already tidy bedroom whenever we’ve finished watching a particularly gruesome one. They can get you like that!

Anyway, the compulsive hoarding of items that are worthless, unsanitary, hazardous to health and that you’ll most likely never use is seen, rightly, I think, as a disease, and one that many doctors and psychologists have made their specialised area of study. The shows I’ve been watching are all American, and it says at the start of each one that nineteen million Americans are afflicted with the disease. And these are just the ones they know about…

The shows all start with the hoarder introducing themselves, sometimes as a hoarder but other times as a ‘collector.’ Nine times out of ten, they are a middle-aged to elderly women. I’ve only seen one show about a man and I didn’t enjoy it half as much, lol. Women, especially elderly ones, are hardcore when it comes to hoarding…!

Often, the hoarding starts after a loved ones dies, and people try to fill the emptiness with ‘stuff.’ The women in particular will go to the Goodwill or thrift stores in their area and shop for ‘bargains,’ like old clothing, dinner plates, Tupperware boxes, toys for the grand-kids, bric-a-brac, old paintings, ornaments, old Christmas decorations and other items. Do that every day for long enough and you’ll soon see the clutter adding up.

Sometimes the women’s homes are so cluttered with their ‘hoard’ that they have to enter and exit the house through a window. One woman had to leave her house and move in with her daughter when her house literally became too full to live in. Needless to say, the daughter wasn’t too happy about her new house-guest!

Another woman made her home in the basement when the other levels of her house became too crowded to inhabit, but the basement itself was so full of her saved items that she could only enter it by doing a sort of demented pole-dance down a banister… It was crazy, man.

It’s often the women’s adult kids who contact these shows seeking help for their moms. The women even still have husbands sometimes, who didn’t put their foot down strongly enough when their wives were coming home from Goodwill with a giant inflatable crocodile for the bath or a wacky clock that plays ‘La Cucaracha’ when it’s time to get up. The husbands are normally all in favour of seeing the clutter gone; they have often no sentimental attachment to it at all.

Enter the experts then; a team of hoard-clearers and/or experts in disposing of biohazardous materials, usually accompanied by a psychologist who’ll stay by the hoarder while the hoard is being cleared out in case they get upset, which they invariably and inevitably do.

It’s understandably mortifying, shaming and embarrassing to have a bunch of strangers with TV cameras come into your home and shine a light on all your grubby little secrets, but the hoarder often has no choice in these cases I’ve watched. Why?

Because it’s either this, a team of experts coming to declutter and sanitise your gaff and make it live-able again, or the County will evict you, or your kids will call Adult Protective Services on you, which no-one seems to want because you could end up in a home. And not your own, either…

It’s heart-breaking to see the old ladies cry and make a huge fuss over having to part with a few used plastic bottles or an old newspaper that they think might contain a recipe they need for meatballs or something.

They hold up the process for hours, much to the annoyance of the clearer-outers, by insisting on going through every single hoarded item individually. They say I need this or that, or this can be washed or that can be recycled, but if it hasn’t been done in x amount of years, what are the chances of its happening now…? Exactly. Out it goes…

In severe cases, we’ve seen rat and/or cockroach infestations, or instances where floors and furniture have rotted away due to the amounts of rat wee and poo that have been allowed to settle there. This makes the dwelling unsafe for human habitation, sadly.

There was even one episode in which a poor old dear wanted to keep the decomposing contents of a broken freezer; she was over-ruled for the most part, but won the battle for the container of nutmeg. She ‘uses nutmeg to cook with, from Thanksgiving through winter,’ but the kitchen itself was inaccessible because of the hoard, so where she actually does this cooking, I honestly couldn’t even tell you.

Aftercare is offered to participants in the show, by the way, as it could be a real shock to the system for someone to have all their belongings slung in a skip before their very eyes. They will definitely need some counselling to help them come to terms with what’s happened, and also to help them to avoid hoarding things again in the future.

 Some people’s attachment to their ‘hoard’ is so strong that it often looks like they’d choose their hoard over their kids if it came to it. I don’t think it’s really even their fault. It’s the disease that’s to blame, and that’s very, very sad. I also can’t help wondering if a load of these elderly hoarders actually pass away before they can ever be said to be fully ‘cured.’

How do you know if you’re a hoarder in need of help? Well, one way to tell is if your most essential spaces, like your kitchen for cooking in, your bath for bathing in and your bed for sleeping in, are too full of crap to be used for the purpose for which they’re intended. Then it’s time to call in the experts…

Speaking personally, I try to stop myself from tipping over into the hoarder category by doing the following: If I buy books and bring them home, then I must also fill a bag with books to go to the charity shop. Some in, some out. I don’t buy magazines any more, Everything’s online now, shure.

Newspapers can stay for one night and one night only and then they go in the bin. Unlike our transatlantic chums, we don’t ‘clip coupons’ over here and I don’t keep a scrapbook so I don’t need to cut out articles or pictures for it. Unless they’re of my crush, Cristiano Ronaldo. When it comes to Ronaldo, all bets are off…