Emotional Hoarding: My Strange Addiction
Let it go, baby.
Hello, my name is Ashley and I’m an emotional hoarder. God, please grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot, blah, blah, blah. You get the idea.
What is an emotional hoarder? I’m so glad you asked.
I keep everything.
Just like a real hoarder, except emotionally. Get it, see what I did there?
When I was younger this meant keeping all the sweatshirts I “borrowed” when I left my boyfriend’s house. It meant locking all our text messages so my flip phone wouldn’t delete them and keeping the cute notes we wrote to each other. I’m showing how old I am here, aren’t I? With the advances in technology, my emotional hoarding has grown leaps and bounds. Now it isn’t just a few shirts that I keep because they still smell like him or her, its every picture, Facebook memory, screenshots of entire conversations for months on end. If it was a relationship that meant anything to me at all, I kept everything. (I also have this weird reverse effect about trysts and things that don’t mean anything. I delete all evidence and forget it ever happen. That is a different essay.)
With one of my more recent relationships, I kept so many things. They sat in a folder my desktop labeled “Do Not Open”. That title practically begged me to…
