Hoarding is never about the *stuff*, not really. It's about your feelings.
Very well put. You should have seen how my mom cried when we convinced her to throw out her huge collection of VHS movies. Even though she hadn't watched one in years, and we gave her an AppleTV with Netflix that would let her see way more movies than she had, the tears poured.
It wasn't about the movies. It was about the feeling of loss around never being able to give those movies to a new set of grandkids, etc, etc. A week or two later, she laughed at her crying. But the separation anxiety at the time was very real.
Likewise, while she was living at the KOA for 7 years, she ended up paying something like $17,000 worth of storage fees to store a 3-bedroom house worth of furniture and crap that wasn't worth anywhere near that. The finances made no sense (we we tried to remind her several times), but it was worth it to her to not lose her stuff - which at the time would have felt like an admission that she'd never live in a real house again.
Emotions, that are wacky.
And I know we've talked about this before, but I figure the quote is applicable to the topic:
You should only own something if you know it to be useful or believe it to be beautiful.
Now excuse me while I tackle my NY resolution of getting rid of 50% of the shit in my garage...
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Very well put. You should have seen how my mom cried when we convinced her to throw out her huge collection of VHS movies. Even though she hadn't watched one in years, and we gave her an AppleTV with Netflix that would let her see way more movies than she had, the tears poured.
It wasn't about the movies. It was about the feeling of loss around never being able to give those movies to a new set of grandkids, etc, etc. A week or two later, she laughed at her crying. But the separation anxiety at the time was very real.
Likewise, while she was living at the KOA for 7 years, she ended up paying something like $17,000 worth of storage fees to store a 3-bedroom house worth of furniture and crap that wasn't worth anywhere near that. The finances made no sense (we we tried to remind her several times), but it was worth it to her to not lose her stuff - which at the time would have felt like an admission that she'd never live in a real house again.
Emotions, that are wacky.
And I know we've talked about this before, but I figure the quote is applicable to the topic:
Now excuse me while I tackle my NY resolution of getting rid of 50% of the shit in my garage...