you wouldn’t know.
You see a collection of stuff in someone’s house, making obstacles you have to weave around and your first thought is, they must be a hoarder. There is another type of messy collector that on the outside looks like hoarder, but has a completely different inner mechanism at work. I’m the second one.
Hoarder vs Chaotic Collector
Same in outward appearance, inside is a different story. Hoarders become emotionally attached to their clutter, they have an extremely hard time letting it go. Chaotic collectors aren’t emotionally attached and with the right help, we can easily let it go. In fact we don’t want it but the same thought processes behind getting rid of what no longer serves you is at work as organising what can go. Let me explain.
You have a junk room that has collected 10 years worth of stuff and you want to clean it out and get the stuff gone. You walk into the room, then what? Most people would say well, you start sorting, working out what you’re keeping, what you’re donating and what you’re trashing, then you get on with it. Most people, but not if you’re neurodivergent.
Deciding what stays and what goes AND where it goes at the same time takes a lot of executive function skills, which nuerodivergent people have difficulty with. For us, deciding what stays and what goes is a separate activity to deciding WHERE things will be going. It takes two different focuses of the brain. And deciding where things will go and then doing it is part of the same process that takes up a lot of energy, more than the brain has, which is why it takes forever for us to get it done. Certainly, much longer than others think it ‘should’.
Now, if you walked into that room with me and asked what was staying and what was going, I could tell you, then if you took everything going and YOU decided what could be donated and what should be trashed, I could have my mess sorted in the time it takes you to cart boxes out of my house. Because I don’t have what is required to get it done myself, not if you want it done within a year that is. I’m attached to surprisingly very little. Most of it I acquired because I come up with a new interest and go on a buying spree because of very little impulse control – that’s another executive function skill I lack. I also have a very strong perfectionist streak so I feel quite strongly that I can’t start a new hobby or interest until I have everything I will need to do it. The last thing I want is to be fully immersed in an activity and have to stop abruptly because I don’t have this one doohickey I need to complete what I’m doing. For me, that means I never really get around to starting anything before the interest wanes.
I did eventually see a pattern of returning to past interests so had the bright idea of keeping what I collect and putting it away for the next go-around at that activity. And there’s the problem, I collect and I collect and I collect and slowly the house fills. Now I have to get rid of everything as I’m starting to feel suffocated in my own home. Along with not enough energy to organise and arrange disbursement, I also don’t have enough energy to deal with selling items online, that’s why I ended up giving away a lot of things for free. This is also why I have decided to hire a company to come and take it all away for me and they get to decide what becomes of it. Like I said, I’m not emotionally attached at all, I just can’t manage getting rid of it on my own.
All this stuff has been my greatest incentive and motivation to explore minimalism, I’m very interested to see what turn my journey will take once it’s all gone and I can organise my home. How will I cope with maintaining a cleaning routine to stay on top of it all? But more about that later, for now my focus is on getting more things packed and ready to be taken away next month.