Everything in its place and a place for everything. That way, it takes minutes to go from creative chaos to calm, and the uncluttered mind can fly free

Aug 10, 2016

How To Control Your Life

Part 91

Background: Stills from ‘The Hoarder Next Door’ (Twenty Twenty) ♦ Foreground: Hoarder’s flat from which firefighters took seven hours to rescue the occupier (photograph by Archant: http://www.archant.co.uk)

All across Britain, thousands of people share a shocking secret: they are living amongst mountains of clutter and rubbish. Pushing their families to breaking point.

…from broken toasters to incontinence pads, suitcases to mustard pots - he’s intent on keeping the lot.

It has been ten to fifteen years since we’ve opened the front door.

This was a large room which is reduced to just walking space.

That whole house - it’s not conducive to human life.

Tina’s holding onto the past by hoarding her parents’ things and her own childhood toys.

His bargain-hunting has spiralled out of control, resulting in a hoard that has taken over his life.

I asked her about the garbage in the living room that appeared to be several feet deep, and she said “I’m having some emotional problems right now”.

If you had a house that was organised, clutter-free, I think you’d be more inspired and more relaxed, and do your work even better than now.
Yes - I think it’d be a transformation.

Quotes from documentaries about hoarding (various)

Do you clutter your house?

If you do - and most people have at least one area in their house, or garden, or outbuilding which is cluttered - how bad is it?

And how bad is it compared to a year ago? Five years ago?

Clutter accumulates. It grows. It almost breeds. Day by day, month by month, year by year it gets worse. What starts out as a small mess of bits and pieces left lying around becomes a messy corner of a room, a cluttered room, and - if you’re not careful - a permanently cluttered home.

If it gets worse than that you can end up living in small part of your home, or even working your way carefully through a single-file path in your home. People have been buried alive in their clutter and not found for days.

But that wouldn’t be you, would it? That would never happen to you.

Would it?

There are stages to clutter. The stages go from not clearing things away (things you’ve used, collected, or actual rubbish) through piling up more items on top of those things, to never clearing anything away until you - literally - can’t move freely in your living space. When it gets to the point where you are no longer clearing anything away, because you can’t get to it and/or you haven’t any more room in cupboards and other places where things should be put away, you’re in real trouble. That’s when true dirt accumulates and mice, flies, cockroaches, rats and so on start moving in.

Your home is probably not at the point where you can barely move, where you have to climb over the clutter and mind where you tread for fear of stepping in faeces. (If it was you probably would have had to give up on your computers and so you wouldn’t be reading this.) So what separates your state of clutter from the hoarders who have had to be rescued from their homes via a window or a firefighter-smashed hole in the wall? (Or, worse, from those hoarders whose clutter collapsed on them, fatally?)

The answer is, rather frighteningly, not a lot.

If you ask someone why a drawer, or a cupboard, or a wardrobe in their home is so cluttered, they’ll come up with an inventive variety of excuses. It’ll be because it’s just a clutter drawer, or they’ve got a bit of a thing for shoes, or life’s too short to be clearing out cupboards. Or they’ll change the subject, or get defensive or hostile.

Don’t you?…

So what is the reason for clutter? It grows - but why does it grow? How does an untidy drawer become a chest of drawers with even no space on top, and then become unreachable because the floor around it has got so cluttered, and then…? It’s not organic growth, someone has to add to the clutter piece by piece until the problem becomes - almost literally - insurmountable.

The reason lies within the person doing the cluttering. If it’s your clutter, then it’s you.

After Gregory passed away, personally I didn’t want to let things go. I mean, even something as disgusting as a trash bag, I didn’t want to lose it. I’d lost my son, I didn’t want to lose anything else.

This quote, again from a documentary about clutter, is telling. One of the most common reasons for clutter getting out of control, for hoarding, is loss.

If you lose someone you loved, through death or in some other way, a huge emptiness appears in your life. You feel it inside you, as if part of your very being had been ripped away. It’s natural to want to fill that emptiness - and quickly. Because it hurts, and it’s frightening.

Some people try and fill the emptiness they feel inside by eating lots of food. Or drinking lots of alcohol. Or taking drugs or whatever. But some people (more and more people, every year) clutter.

If you clutter you are filling up the space round you. You are making the walls of your home thicker. You are making your living space smaller, less empty, perhaps more womb-like? You are shoring up your life with piles of things.

Soon it becomes impossible even to contemplate tackling the problem. Look at the pictures above - where would you start? And the clutter in those pictures isn’t yours so it doesn’t even have any meaning for you, any emotional linking to your mind and soul. When you try and help someone declutter, it’s a very painful process, quite literally. They will explain why they can’t get rid of this item, and that item, and the other item - any item. They will break down in tears, they will become defensive, hostile, angry, aggressive. This is not just helping a friend get rid of a few bits of junk, this is wrenching bleeding parts of life out of their hands.

When it gets to this point, it’s probably a job for a professional or two. Not firefighters, hopefully, but declutterers and psychologists.

Don’t let it get that far if you want to control your life.

Clutter isn’t just clutter. Clutter is a symptom of a life that’s getting out of control. You need to stop, take stock, work out what’s wrong. When clutter starts, that’s when you can get help from non-professionals: friends, people who love you. Don’t hide the problem, ask them about it. A simple “Do you see this mess? It never used to be like this - what do you think it’s all about?” or suchlike will be enough. Have a discussion. You will know the answer because it’s inside you, but what you may need is a mirror - and that’s what friends do, they hold up a mirror for you.

Your task, at that point, will be to listen. To listen and hear. Not to get defensive, or hostile. Of course it’s painful to admit that you’ve slipped up a bit, lost a touch of control in your life, been knocked down. But a good friend will be only too glad to help and has probably been wanting to say something for a while. (It would be a strange friend who hadn’t noticed that there was something wrong.)

There are plenty of ways to fill up an aching void in your life - but collections of Disney figurines, shoes, newspapers or rubbish isn’t one of them. And because it isn’t, once you start hoarding something like this you’re on a downward staircase to hell. Every time you go to a car boot sale or a designer clothes outlet, or onto eBay and buy yet another item for your collection, or every time you add another magazine or drinks can to the big pile in your room, you’re taking another step into chaos.

The good news is that every time you clear something out, even if it’s just clearing a small space on a shelf or throwing two pizza boxes away instead of adding them to the pile, you’re taking a step forward to getting your life back under control.

And every time you take a step forward, you’ll feel stronger, freer, clearer. You’ll feel more in control - and you’ll start to heal.

Twitter: Maryon Jeane