Quitting/putting collecting on pause

JakeEkiss said:
Some of this is I need to be saving money as I get older. Some of it is just keeping space available. But most of it, the biggest chunk of it, is dealing with my aging mother and her hoarder house. She lives alone in a 4 bedroom place and there's barely a pathway through any given room wide enough for a grown man. There are a dozen chairs and sitting furniture in the place, but never more than one in any given room that isn't filled with junk. If you try to move anything, a stack next to it will fall over, usually onto you. She won't et rid of any of it, and she's got unopened food items with "sell by" dates in 2012. And she keeps buying more.
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That's most definitely hoarding. Sorry to hear that because it can really become a debilitating condition that isolates the hoarder from everyone else.
 
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I think I get the collecting bug from my mother. She collects buildings to make Halloween and Christmas Villages. Probably has 700 or more and it is one of the big reasons I get stressed out in the final three months of the year because I have to help her set it all up. She doesn't leave it up year round because each of them takes up the whole garage. I'm not talking about just buildings sitting on tables or shelves. There is a whole terrain thing that I've done for her with mountains, swamps, rivers, etc.

I definitely don't think she is a hoarder but like myself she isn't good at telling herself no.
 
For various reasons, my mom kept in touch with her siblings after leaving but kept away from them for the most part. I didn't meet them until much later, but I was really taken back that one uncle collected super power figures and mego, another uncle collected and fabricated prop replicas, and one of my cousins collected 80s toys. I never had any contact with these people yet had so much in common with them right there. (My mom collects movies and books, for the record. And my dad makes fun of all of us.)
 
EnigmaticClarity said:
In the most extreme forms the hoarder also has almost no emotional connection to the things they're hoarding and don't even know the entirety of what they have.
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Yeah. This is my mother. She has no idea what she has, and loses the things she does know she has in the giant mass of crap everywhere else. She's also more than a little paranoid, and for decades now, whenever she loses something, automatically assumes it's been stolen. Stolen by thieves who somehow can slip in and out of any home she's ever lived in undetected, who go for small, valueless items while passing up TVs and computers and jewelry or cash.

Her general habit is when she sees something on sale that she "might" use one day, or "might" gift to someone for a holiday, she buys it. Then she promptly stores and forgets she bought it, and if she sees it, or something like it again, the process will repeat. She's one tiny old woman with two walk-in closets and 4 smaller ones (plus various tubs and bins) full to bursting with clothes. Many of which she's never worn, or wore when they fit her 20 years ago and never since. Much of the hoard has moved with her multiple times.

She's just now starting to agree she needs to get rid of things, now that her mobility and manual dexterity has gone to shit. But she wants to do it one box at a time with long deliberation over everything. Doing it that way will take 10 years and I doubt she'll live that long. I keep asking her to just get one of those dumpsters they drop off and then haul away. 50% of the stuff in her house could go straight into the bin because it's obviously old broken garbage now, and it would improve her quality of life massively. But she doesn't want that option.

Sorry for the rant there, but yeah, suffice to say I've got a sharp reminder of what over-collecting could dip into and I don't want to live in that place.
 
EnigmaticClarity said:
People often throw the hoarder label around carelessly as many people also throw other terms around like racist, addict, etc, but my own definition is that it's hoarding when the items you have make it functionally difficult for anyone to navigate the space in your house. In the most extreme forms the hoarder also has almost no emotional connection to the things they're hoarding and don't even know the entirety of what they have.
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My dad is on the lower end of the hoarding spectrum. He does woodworking as a hobby and his thing is furniture. He stockpiles furniture that he buys cheap at auctions, estate sales, and flea markets. I wouldn't call it collecting. It's all quality stuff, but he has so much of it that he'll never have time to refinish and flip it all, let alone use it. There's a narrow path through his house, but you're always at risk of tripping over something.

My mom is much worse. I think she counteracted severe depression with retail therapy for almost 25 years. Nothing was ever thrown away. Even empty cardboard packaging was stored in closets, dressers, and drawers. She lives alone in 2000 square feet with a four-car garage. She can barely fit her car in the garage and the rest of it isn't navigable at all. Her house is almost as bad. She has no idea what she has and nearly every room in her house is straight-up hazardous.

Somehow, she came to see the light about two years ago. She realized she was living in unsafe conditions and started going through her stuff. I talked to my therapist about it at length, and my therapist said hoarding is almost impossible to "cure." If the person doesn't come to the conclusion themselves, you won't be able to break the habit. If you threw away everything they had, they'd just amass it all over again within years. Even after two years of diligently going room by room, her house is still a disaster. I think she'll eventually finish, but it's not lost on me that it'll be my job if she doesn't.
 
TheSameIdiot said:
My mom is much worse. I think she counteracted severe depression with retail therapy for almost 25 years. Nothing was ever thrown away. Even empty cardboard packaging was stored in closets, dressers, and drawers. She lives alone in 2000 square feet with a four-car garage. She can barely fit her car in the garage and the rest of it isn't navigable at all. Her house is almost as bad. She has no idea what she has and nearly every room in her house is straight-up hazardous.

Somehow, she came to see the light about two years ago. She realized she was living in unsafe conditions and started going through her stuff. I talked to my therapist about it at length, and my therapist said hoarding is almost impossible to "cure." If the person doesn't come to the conclusion themselves, you won't be able to break the habit. If you threw away everything they had, they'd just amass it all over again within years. Even after two years of diligently going room by room, her house is still a disaster. I think she'll eventually finish, but it's not lost on me that it'll be my job if she doesn't.
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Whoa, your mom was DEFINITELY a hoarder. I've never heard of one voluntarily stopping, so that's great to hear she came back from it! Any idea what changed her thinking two years ago? Did the hoard cause some undeniable harm to her finances or relationships perhaps?
 
EnigmaticClarity said:
Whoa, your mom was DEFINITELY a hoarder. I've never heard of one voluntarily stopping, so that's great to hear she came back from it! Any idea what changed her thinking two years ago? Did the hoard cause some undeniable harm to her finances or relationships perhaps?
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I think she finally started to recover from the grief/depression that drove her to hoard. My sister and I were incessant about telling her to clean the place up. I'm not sure how much that helped.
 
I come at this from the other direction: my folks keep their house like a museum and have a housekeeper come in a couple times a week. My mom is legitimately pathological about what she perceives to be “mess”, and also used cleaning and organizing as punishments when I was growing up. Hell, I spent the summer AFTER COLLEGE stuck in my room at night because it was never “clean enough to leave” before I moved out officially. When I say “pathological”, I mean that she convinced herself that I wasn’t *bathing* at college (which was absolutely absurd and provably incorrect, I literally brought home towels to wash my first time home). She/they were also obsessed with “appropriateness”, like super-rigid table manners and politeness, and also after a certain point some things I loved were no longer “OK”. They eventually softened somewhat, but for my 12th birthday I got a card with a cardboard cutout of a rabbit in it, which they said would be my last “little man”, no more action figures.
So I defied them and did it anyway, mostly in secret for several years.
When I packed my car for 2nd semester of college in ‘97, (wasn’t allowed the car at school first semester, had to prove my grades) they saw toys and comics in the boxes and my mom FREAKED. “YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE TIME FOR THOSE THINGS DOWN THERE YOU SHOULD BE WORKING”. I pointed out that I would have similar free time to what I had at home in high school, but that didn’t cut it. “Get those out of the car, or there will be no food/gas/go-to-the-movies allowance”. I said fine, drove down, and promptly got a weekend job as a birthday-party clown. Which they ALSO freaked out about. “YOU SHOULD BE STUDYING WE NEVER INTENDED YOU TO HAVE TO WORK DURING THE SEMESTER!” “Yeah. Well, you tried to take my joy, so I’m buying it back.”

And so it has gone in the 25+ years since. I got it all: “no one will want to date you/marry you if you like these things”, “don’t you think life would be easier if you were ‘normal’?” All that stuff. Again: they have backed off, mostly because I finally got married.
Like yes: I feel bad that these “regular” folks got saddled with a deeply weird goth kid more interested in medieval Eastern European folklore than integrating into society. And don’t get me wrong: they are VERY supportive of the things they “approve” of: they come to all my performances, even as recently as this last weekend. And they have MOSTLY stopped commenting on how I dress.
But yes, there is an element of my collecting that is absolutely a rebellion against their individualized oppression, and also basically a fuck-you to all their “grown men don’t do that” rhetoric.

It’s definitely why I own the giant Mondo vinyl Scare-Glow: I viscerally remember my mom gaslighting me out of buying him when I was a kid (talk ME out of buying a glowing skeleton man in a purple cape????), so every time I see a cool Scare-Glow thing, I grab and say “fuck you, Mom” out loud.

Anyway: all that is to say that it is hard to find balance when you were told most of your life that action figure collecting was functionally as bad for your life as drugs.
 
Haha, wow, the passive aggressive collecting rings true with me too. I remember when I was a teenager, my older brother wrote me a check for my birthday. In the note it said "you can spend this on anything EXCEPT action figures". LOOK AT ME NOW, RICK!! SURROUNDED BY ACTION FIGURES! BWAHAHA!!! Yes. I am clearly the winner between the two of us.
 
Heheh, I’d say mine was more “aggressive” than “passive-aggressive”. The older and more independent I got, the more “out” to them as a goth and a collector and a general weirdo I became. Like “dated a DJ and was a hardcore club kid in two different goth/punk bands in my 20s” aggressive. I do remember the time I snuck out of a hotel in New York to go to the Times Square TRU where they had the whole Galactus BAF wave plus variants, then assembling Galactus in the airport lounge while drinking a beer and fucking DARING anyone to say a word. I also remember being 9 in 1987 and my mom trying to bribe me to do my math homework: “fine, one Joe for every ditto sheet”. You best believe I had the entire 1987 Cobra roster the next day.
Hehehe, I remember when the lady who would become my college girlfriend started showing an interest in me, I marched her up to my dorm room, showed her my shit, said “listen: I drove 20 miles to Santa Monica to buy this Radu from Subspecies action figure today, this is what I do, if you want to date me this is what’s gonna be going on with me” and she was like “sounds good, toys are cool” and then we hooked up.
I guess it helps that I have a variety of obsessive interests, toys being only one. Although toys tend to connect all my interests.

Bah. Thinking about this makes me think about dying, which makes me think about my cat dying. I’m gonna go run around a track and do pull ups until I feel less weird.
 
TheSameIdiot said:
I was thinking we might need a pet thread. I have three cats myself.
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Honestly these threads that aren't specifically about a figure line are the best ones. I've got a few ideas for some also that I may post in the coming weeks.

I don't feel like we had nearly enough of them at the old place and I feel like they are the threads where we really get to know each other. Much moreso than the figure threads.
 
Justice said:
Honestly these threads that aren't specifically about a figure line are the best ones. I've got a few ideas for some also that I may post in the coming weeks.

I don't feel like we had nearly enough of them at the old place and I feel like they are the threads where we really get to know each other. Much moreso than the figure threads.
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Agreed. I’m trying to commit myself to being more “open” and vulnerable here than I was back at the ol’ place, definitely agree that the “not necessarily about toys” threads are awesome for that.
 
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