Hello, my name is Sandy and I am obsessed with the TV show 'Hoarders'. If you haven't seen this, it's basically about people with chronic hoarding issues and by chronic hoarding I don't mean they own a few too many things. I mean they are swamped by crap. Some of them sleep in their cars because there's no room in their houses any more. They can't use their kitchens or bathrooms because they can't get into them. Their families and friends are almost literally pushed out the door by a solid wall of largely useless garbage. Some of them see there's a problem and some don't. But whether they see it or not they all have the same problem: they just can't let go of things that are ultimately destroying their lives.
The kindest man in the world, who is generally pretty tolerant of my love of reality TV, can't watch it and I totally get that. It can be very painful viewing. A couple of the participants I have wanted to reach through the TV screen and punch because of their apparent inability to see that they are destroying not only their own lives, but other peoples', or their complete ingratitude that other people have made the effort to try and help them out of the shitpit that they themselves have created.
Whoohoo, what a vista of frolics and laughter! No wonder you watch it, I hear you saying, and by that I mean I can hear you muttering 'bloody hell, what would you want to watch that freakshow for' and again I totally get that. The thing is, I also get the show participants. I may not live in a house packed to the rafters with empty cans and cat poo, but I understand. While also horrified and occasionally having to at the screen with my hand over my face, but I understand.
My name is Sandy and I have been a hoarder. You can get through my front door and sit down and have a coffee anytime without the fear of a wall of boxes falling on your head, so don't be afraid to come around to my house, but I hold my hands up to hoarding. I've put a lot of work into not doing it any more, but occasionally I need to force myself to have a good clearout. Because while a hoarded house is bad, a hoarded mind can be even worse.
If you've read my previous blogs you've probably worked out by now my life has been a tad eventful and it has, at various phases, left me with a lot of baggage that I have successfully and unsuccessfully managed to unload. I say both successfully and unsuccessfully because I think I'm pretty good at the taking responsibility for my own reactions to things part. What I haven't been so good at is letting things go and if you watch Hoarders often enough you know what that means. It means you get buried alive under a pile of empty pizza boxes, ten month old milk, unwashed clothes and manky Christmas cards from 1973. Not a place you want to be, but if you let that stuff accumulate long enough you can have a very, very hard time getting out from under it.
Why do I still allow space in my head for the people who shat on me, the opportunities I missed, the things I fucked up, and all the rest of the crap which I can not only not go back and change but has occasionally stuffed my head so full that it's left me outside myself not knowing how the hell to get back in?
I don't believe in living in regret, because you can't go back and change anything. Not the people who you shouldn't have trusted, the job you didn't put quite enough into, the bone you broke, the massive hangovers, the friend you lost, the time you ate your own bodyweight in Jaffa Cakes. None of it. It is gone. End of. Game over.
And yet somehow I still find myself at times thinking that if I had done better, been better, managed better, WAS better....those things somehow would magically have not have happened and I would be sitting here a well adjusted woman who is not at all unhinged or obese. And maybe it could have happened that way. It didn't. Suck it up and move on.
I don't want to spend my life clinging on to boxes of garbage, or even things that are attractive but clutter me up. I've seen it stuff up people too often. A dear friend of mine, now departed this earth, spend most of his life accumulating bad memories and regrets and wound up shoving nearly everybody out of his life. I still occasionally shake a fist at the heavens and tell him 'you could have been happy, you stupid bastard', in the same way I occasionally shake a fist at myself and say 'you can be happy, you silly bitch'. It's too late for him, but it's not too late for me.
The self hypno is my cleaning crew at the moment and I hope to soon have a pristine mind free of negative crap in which I can live a happy, contented, productive life. I will not hoard stuff which is useless to me any more. I, and the people I love, deserve better than that.
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