This weekend, I read a book. A whole book. In a day, actually.
It’s been a very long time since I squandered (or invested) an entire day on reading. I did surface for food, sunshine, and eye contact, but mostly I read steadily and greedily until I was done.
How good does that feel? Better than inhaling a whole tub of frappacino-laced-with-scorched-almonds-and-toffee-sauce ice cream, that’s for sure.
So what held my attention so grippingly? It was a memoir, of all things. Lessons in letting go: Confessions of a hoarder by Corinne Grant. Engaging, excruciating and insightful all at once, I was captured immediately and didn’t want to stop reading until she had grasped her redemption (or in this case, let go of it utterly).
What fascinated me the most was that throughout this period when she was privately debilitated by psychological barriers as tall as the wall of boxes in her lounge room, she was still functioning and making a career for herself as a performer “out there” under the steely gaze of the public. And yet the whole time her self-image, brittle in its outdatedness, was stretched thin under the weight of her inflated sense of guilt, responsibility and remorse, held tightly in place by the glue of unexpressed grief.
To my mind, this illustrates just how marvellously effective our false masks can be. People generally are happy to accept these masks because it is infinitely more comfortable than being confronted with the messier truth: that we too may not be functioning/coping as well as we project to the world.
But before all of that, before I could even begin to clear out my life, I had to figure out where it all started. Irrespective of how it may look to an outsider, hoarders don’t just pop out of the ground fully formed. Hoarding isn’t something anyone is aware of until it’s too late. Hoarding sneaks up on you in the middle of the night wearing glasses and a false moustache and weasels its way in when you’re not looking.
Before the stuff went, I was going to have to get to the truth of the matter. And the truth of the matter is this: hoarding doesn’t start with the stuff. It starts with something else.
And that something else is much, much harder to get rid of.
Very interesting, and ultimately inspiring read. Highly recommended for anyone (not mentioning any names) who has a hard-to-shift stuff-stash in their spare room.
