Not every hoader is the same

I get a bit annoyed about the way hoarding and hoarders are portrayed in the media. People are ashamed to say they have hoarding tendencies because the immediate image people have is filthy chaos, which isn't all hoarders at all. That is the extreme end of hoarding. Maybe that is where you end up when you are isolated and feeling ashamed is the beginning of that isolation.

Hoarders are interesting people

After having belonged to a hoarding group for a while, I think you can put hoarders into two groups - those that are overly creative and sensitive and those that have lives that are messed up in every way and their hoarding is just part of the complete and utter chaos.

The second group might be creative and sensitive too of course, but it's hard to tell. Maybe they are just less organised hoarders? I'm not saying the mess is their fault. They probably haven't made good choices, but sometimes that ability is taken away from you by stress or circumstance. Sometimes the only choices are bad choices. Once you get yourself in a hole, it is almost impossible to get out by yourself and if you have no social support then you don't get out.

The second group also seem more caught up in themselves. They don't seem to have much empathy or interest in other people's problems or successes and just want to talk about how awful their lives are. Many seem to have mental health issues too. 

The worry for me is that one group could just be the logical extension of the other.... Which just makes me want to quote Sherlock Holmes, but since I'm unlikely to be in the 'grace of God' I'd better just help myself not go from creative hoarder to 'life in chaos hoarder'.

Anyway, any time I doubt the choices I've made in life, I can think about these other people and know it can be worse. I could have done worse.

Right, so I'm trying to make my living through craft.

This is a change for me. I was a ‘visual artist’ and then a ‘graphic designer’. It’s not a real change... but this time I’d like to combine the two. I’d like to make something that’s worthwhile making and make money.

There has been a huge resurgence in craft recently. Did you notice? It’s the children of the 70’s and 80’s and their nostalgia that drives it. Remember that hand tooled leather purse your mother had. Remember that crocheted jacket? It doesn’t matter the reason really, I still love that it’s in fashion, even if so much of it is NOT MY THING. After all, much of the world isn’t.

Grief is like water

It steals bits of your life, leaving you like debris on an unknown beach. Washed over and tumbled, pale and bleached.

It joins with all the other grief in a deep well and drowns you again. Nothing can ever be the same when you surface. If you surface.

Sometimes life is just brief moments of glistening happiness between sticky webs of grief....

On the subject of hoarding....

For ten years we've been throwing things out... and buying more things, but mostly throwing things out. There has been some headway, but on the whole the other things just seem to expand and no extra space seems to get made. We have one room that is particularly bad and under the house is bad too. Goat track material, but not too horrible in that it's 'stuff' not 'rubbish', although some would disagree. I've gotten a bit more serious about it in the last year or so, joining online help groups and trying to change the way I do things, the way I think. This is my Pinterest Board on the subject -- http://pinterest.com/rosz_craig/hoarding/

bored with being boxed in by assumptions

Unthinkingly, you always answer those questions rather than avoiding them cleverly. You know, the ones that box you in. The questions about where you work, about what you do.

When you do answer, you feel the conversation enclosing like a boa constrictor. The more you say about ‘work’ the less likely some new and interesting topic will be introduced.

The information is used, innocently, to assume things about you. Where you work and what you do for a living – these indicate things about you. Not necessarily correct things, or things you would want people to construe.

I used to say ‘artist’ – that, for the most part, would stymie people and cause them to have to think of something interesting to ask. They could assume you were poor, but generally they didn’t really know what to assume without more input.

When I ask people what they do, I’m going through the motions. Of course I’ll be excited if you are an artist (generally because I think I will have a good conversation – equally happy with scientists) or have something else in common with me so I can extend the conversation and practise being human. I will make assumptions too, but I always make every assumption with a grain of salt.

Really though, I don’t care what you do for a living – I want to know what you think.

Have I read this? Would I remember it?

Reading Vittorio the vampire by Anne Rice. I picked it up at the markets and had to buy it to get away from the nice-but-too-chatty marketer. I don't think I've read it before, but perhaps I wouldn't remember because it has very little substance. It is the slightly flowery language and it is the tapestry of the historical world. It is well written, but seems to lack something. I wonder if I look on my bookshelf if there is another copy or was it so nebulous I wouldn't have kept it? I'd like to think that my memory would at least retain books, but alas, lately.... I do tend to remember covers, but this cover is remarkably bad so I might have wiped it from my mind. Will I ever know and does it matter? Hanging out for the next installment of Game of Thrones.