I am a Compulsive Keeper. Can we please not use the word hoarder (“Understanding Compulsive Hoarding,” March 24 issue)? First of all it rhymes with an epithet. Secondly, it implies deliberate selfish stockpiling of something others could use, like a Dog-in-the-Manger, if you remember your Aesop Fables. “Compulsive Keeper” has better alliteration.
Instead of calling us names, and treating us like we are sick, or feeble-minded, or both, how about starting a 12-step-like support group for us. It is not easy being a keeper.
Since I am most certainly not demented, I can give you an inside story on this inherited condition. Most of us got it from our parents. Both of mine went through the Great Depression. Neither of them ever threw away anything that “might come in handy someday.” My dad kept anything made of metal or wood, as he was both a carpenter and a mechanic, and an incurable tinkerer. Mom was more eclectic, being a homemaker and mother, who cooked, canned, sewed, repaired … all the things moms did back then. Plus she loved to read, and she treasured all gifts and memorabilia. The old saw is “I came by it honestly.”
My siblings and I are now dealing with a large house and several sheds full of all of their “someday” stuff. One problem is that photos and letters that are family history are all mixed in with junk mail and church bulletins. Birth certificates are mixed in with financial records and receipts, which people were told to keep for seven years. These got kept for nearly 70 years. The important must be sifted from the useless, a time-consuming process. And time is a big issue with us compulsive keepers. There is never enough of it for all we want to do. We often gather all the materials needed for projects that we can never seem to get around to completing.
I keep paper. There are reasons. I want to use it, read it or look at it again, later when I have time. Right now, I am busy with something else interesting. I am an avid reader and a lifelong educator, I love books, and I collect information. My daughter’s friend once kindly called me an “archivist.” I make no apology. My degree in education included training in maintaining a file cabinet full of useful information. I have never stopped. All subjects are of interest to me (except sports, sorry guys) especially people and their ways. Maybe I’m an amateur sociologist collecting data. My journals could certainly be data for some others who study people. I am a thinker, so I write my thoughts, and keep them in stacks of spiral notebooks. I have always aspired to be a writer, so ideas and notes for stories, poems, essays, articles are also in the piles. When will I write them? Well, as Granny Weatherwax said in Terry Pratchet’s “Weird Sisters,” “I ain’t dead yet.”
I have a creative side, so there are file drawers filled with pictures clipped from magazines for a collage project I have planned. And oh, yes, there are magazines and newspapers that I hope to get back to someday to clip some more. And of course, you know there are photo albums, and drawers full of photos that have yet to be put into them. I am sentimental. I like to keep memorabilia to remind me of good times past. Programs from high school to the present. Articles about the ballet or opera that I enjoyed so much. I won’t mention corsages because the rats got to those long ago.
As I said at the beginning, there ought to be a support group for people like me who still have all our faculties and recognize what we are doing but can’t quite control it. As for the truly elderly and/or demented, I say leave them alone. They are comforted by their stuff. They won’t be with us much longer, and to take away their treasures would be like stripping them of their clothing, shaving off all their hair, and while you are at it, yanking out their teeth. Let them be. By the way, your illustration left out the bulletin board over the desk where the clutter climbs up the walls.
Glenda Owen, Kirkland
