Verna’s a hoarder, and she knows it.
Her house is stacked, floor to ceiling, with 16 years worth of stuff. She collects everything, it seems—broken furniture, empty plastic bottles, yarn. Underneath, mice and rats live and die, unnoticed. Verna abandoned most of her house long ago and now lives, essentially, in the attic: To get to her bed, the 67-year-old must hang onto a dresser and fling her body over new piles of garbage to land safely on her mattress.
“I think she’s trying to fill something,” her daughter says, “and I’m not quite sure what it is.”
A&E’s Hoarders may be one of television’s saddest shows. Through it, viewers meet people who suffer from a compulsive need to collect and gather and accumulate. We see how their stuff takes over their lives and rips apart their families. To us, the solution seems simple: Toss that junk away. But we all know it’s not that easy. These people are trying to fill something. And in the absence of understanding what that something is or how to fill it, they plug that space with whatever they can find … and the hole is never satisfied.
That is itself, of course, an oversimplification. Anyone who knows a hoarder, I’m sure, could correct me. The condition is complex—too complex for a blogger and movie reviewer like me to tackle.
But anytime you meet someone, even through the imperfect conduit of television, it’s human nature for us to look for commonalities and differences in those to whom we’ve been introduced. And when I watch Hoarders, I too see similarities.
An example: I’m not a big shopper, but when I buy a new DVD, it makes me happy—even if that DVD does nothing more than sit on my shelf for years. I don’t need it. I don’t use it. But something tells me I’m a better person—more complete, somehow—for having bought it.
Another: As part of my job, I use nifty, battery-operated pens that light up at the end, so I can take notes in screenings without bothering the folks around me. But they’re costly, finicky things, prone to break now and then. But do I throw the old ones away? No. I keep them. I could still write with them at the office, I rationalize (though I rarely do), and so they accumulate on my desk in limbo—too good to throw away, but not good enough to actually use.
The stuff we own and keep always fills a need. Otherwise, we wouldn’t buy it or keep it. It may not be a real need—a coffee mug that we actually drink coffee from, for instance, or the computer I’m using right now. It might be a more emotional need. I have a plastic “ninja gun” on my desk (it’s a gun that actually catapults tiny ninjas) given to me by my workmates at a paper I once worked for. Now, Plugged In frowns at shooting plastic ninjas at workmates, but I keep it on hand. Somehow, through that goofy little toy, I feel a little more connected to old friends.
I “need” about 10 percent of the stuff I have at my desk. And yet, part of me feels a certain “need” for much of the rest … even if I’m not sure just what that need is.
Is that altogether bad? No. I think we all have things that we treasure for one reason or another, and often they’re worth valuing. I’d be loathe to get rid of my ninja gun. But I think there’s an inherent danger in treasuring it too much. “Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things,” Paul tells the Colossians. He knows, as do we, that these things can distract us from what’s really important. Sometimes through our toys and broken pens, we lose sight of God and the real things of value God gave us. And that’s a problem.
Verna was reluctant to part with her stuff—at one point saying her stash of old yarn was worth more to her than a relationship with her daughter. But you don’t need a classified mental condition to suffer from too much love of stuff: How many preschoolers have bopped someone on the head over a toy? How many shoppers have pushed others out of the way for a Black Friday deal? How many siblings have squabbled over the conditions of a will? It’s not just hoarders who value what is, in the grand scheme of things, valueless. It’s all of us.
This blog post officially concludes our Month of Junk. It’s been a fun ride for me, but now it’s on to other things.
Like cleaning my desk.
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