taking out the trash

(by kristen m. grimm)

Dear Fellow Hoarders,

I am not balanced, and I am making my peace with this reality. It has taken this very messy spirit of mine many arduous years of trying to find that coveted ideal of "domestic balance" to finally come to that place of accepting me for who I am. So here is the truth of the matter.

Sometimes I am a hoarder, and I have emotional attachments to strange things like rulers and empty perfume bottles.

But occasionally, I swing to the other side of hoarding and I start running upstairs armed with a box of hefty, hefty, trash bags and I start stuffing everything but the carpet and the children into them. I run to the closets and I start hurling things onto the bed as if my "domestically bipolar life" depends on it.  

This time I accumulated 30 bags of junk and 12 bags of trash, a whopping total of 42 bags from the upstairs of my house. And yes, the truth of the daunting matter is that I have not touched the downstairs level of my home.  

Why am I doing this?  Many reasons really.  But if I start walking down the hallway of my soul and go into those rooms that I rarely open, those soul rooms that are cluttered with irrational sentimentalities, I must force open the door to find that probably, more than likely, I am cleaning out this house of mine to make more room for more stuff.