Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things by Frost Randy

Author:Frost, Randy [Frost, Randy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Health
ISBN: 9780547422558
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 7951336
Publisher: Mariner Books
Published: 2010-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Anita and Waste

While some hoarders, such as Ralph, become captivated by the possibilities in things, others are trapped by the fear of wasting them. Both types would save the rusty bucket with the hole in it, but for different reasons. For Ralph, imagining uses for the rusty bucket brought him joy.

Anita, a participant in one of our treatment studies, spent little time thinking about possibilities, but a great deal of time worrying and feeling guilty about waste. For her the bucket would bring pain as she thought about what a wasteful person she would be if she discarded it.

Anita was a former schoolteacher and author who impressed me immediately with her insight into her own thought processes. She knew that she had a problem, and she could see it unfolding before her—and articulate it, step by step—but she felt powerless to stop it. Her plight was embodied in the "story of the gloves"—her own painful (and unsuccessful) effort to throw away a single pair of holey gloves.

Anita already had six overstuffed drawers of gloves, but these were her favorite kind—soft wool that fit perfectly and came high up on her wrists.

They were striped, which she thought was cute. They didn't show age like white gloves, and they were especially soft. But one of them had a hole in it. She couldn't mend the hole, she knew she'd never wear the gloves, and she knew she should throw them out.

Then she paused and thought that perhaps she should find someone to mend them. But the hole had developed quickly, which meant that the gloves were poorly constructed and probably not worth mending. She thought maybe she could put them in the rag bag, "then I could get rid of them without really getting rid of them." But her rag bag was already overflowing with better rag material. As she pondered this, she finally said, "I hate to put them in the trash. I know it's stupid, but ninety-nine percent of the glove is still usable! They're perfect otherwise, and they're so cute, it seems like such a waste. I've read articles about how wasteful the average American is, and here is this perfectly good fabric that I'm wasting!"

As she continued to talk, she again came to the conclusion that she should throw the gloves out. She also thought that it might help her to write down some of the arguments she'd generated so that she could remember them for the next item she confronted. Her first argument was for things she found cute: "The argument is that there are other cute things, and I don't need this." She went on, "And if I think I might use it, in reality I won't."

At this point, she became tearful. "And if I think it's wasteful, the answer is that it's not my fault." She began to cry in earnest. Through her sobs, she continued, "I didn't make the gloves crummy, so I'm not being bad. I'm doing the best I can with a bad situation.

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