Hoarding: The Flesh House

October 22, 2012

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Theme Essay by Karen J. Ohlson

The Trouble With Storing Up Ideas

I call it the flesh house.

Its plain stucco walls are a raw, pinky beige, as though they were daubed with calamine lotion instead of paint. Its balding patch of lawn is weed flecked, anchored by a couple of ancient lawn chairs. Multiple decrepit cars and vans hunker protectively in front. One van is painted a fleshy beige (well, white folks’ “fleshy”), while another has a blown-out window webbed with black tape.

No other house in my neighborhood exerts the same power over me. When I walk by those sentry-like autos—striving to maintain a normal pace behind my oblivious, happily sniffing dog—I see that the back seats are piled high with papers, clothing, and assorted junk. I imagine the interior of the house similarly filled. There but for the grace of God….

Even as I tamp down my dread, I feel a frisson of secret pleasure: I’m storing the details of this house in my mind. I note the warped paperback books on the van’s dashboard, the rusting metal appliance in the yard, the dog leash attached to one of the lawn chairs with a rope. Someday, I’ll write about this.

This thought repeats for months, then years, each time my dog pulls me past this house. Someday, I’ll write about this. Until one day I realize what I’m doing with the details I store away and never use.

I’m hoarding.

The Sin of Holding In

Years ago, I had to pick a yama to write about for a yoga class. The five yamas are intended to combat non-yogic behavior, much as the seven Catholic virtues aim to vanquish the deadly sins. (“Begone, Sloth!” cries Diligence. “Retreat, Pride,” whispers Humility.) I was supposed to describe the particular challenges this yama posed to me and my yoga practice.

I considered the list: ahimsa (nonviolence), satya (truthfulness), asteya (nonstealing), brachmacharya (control of sexual energy), and aparigraha (nonhoarding).

What? Hoarding is a sin on a par with violence and stealing? I was amused at first. But the thought kept grabbing at my attention.

I resisted it for awhile. After all, I’ve never been a hoarder, not in the classic sense. Okay, I tend to let my unopened mail pile up and my closets accumulate stuff to be sorted. But it’s not because I want to keep that stuff. I love shooing it out the door when I finally find the time to go through it.

And yet, the word hoarding brought something up for me: an image of a woman with her bent knees drawn close to her chest, arms circling them protectively. Holding things in. It felt familiar. It felt like…me.

As I read more about aparigraha, I started to see the point of it. It’s not just about living an uncluttered life and resisting attachment to wealth and possessions; it’s also about letting go. It’s about being able to empty yourself and to trust that you’ll be filled again.

I saw how that image of “holding in” fit me in my yoga poses: never pushing myself to go all out, always holding something in reserve—a certain amount of energy, of effort. If I were to let it all out, I thought, I'd deplete myself; I wouldn’t be able to carry on.

I felt this way even though I'd observed the following in yoga class: The teacher would instruct a student to stretch in a particular direction, and that student would respond so completely that it would seem impossible to go farther—until the teacher said, “Good. Now do it again.”

I recognized aparigraha as my personal challenge. I wrote with great sincerity about my need to trust that I could go all out in my yoga poses. Then I tossed away the thought and the class assignment—until I began to imagine writing about the flesh house.

Getting It All Down—or Not

Probably all writers have begun to write something mentally while they're occupied with a physical task—say, walking the dog or taking a shower. As your body goes through the familiar motions, your mind drifts and you get an idea. You play with words and phrases. You think, “I can’t wait to sit down and get this on paper” (or virtual paper), and maybe you really can’t wait. Maybe you sit down at the first available moment and scribble away.

Or maybe, like me, you continue to store the details lovingly in your mind, and time passes, and these details get covered over by more details about something else, and they become harder to retrieve.

It’s almost as though a physical barrier builds up—something I need to push against with great effort. Even though I want to release this thing-to-be-written from my mind and let it out into the world, there is something stopping me. Some need to keep the details and thoughts and feelings inside, to hold on tight.

After I started writing this essay, prompted by the editor who cajoled me into making the attempt, I went out for coffee with a friend I hadn’t seen in awhile. It turned out she'd been overwhelmed by the aftermath of her father’s death, which had been traumatic.

After she and her husband broke down the door of his house to find out why he’d been unreachable, she walked by her father's body without seeing it at first. It was difficult to spot amid the mountains of paper, junk, and rotting garbage that filled all but a few “goat paths” through the house.

“I knew things were bad, but I had no idea they were that bad,” she said, noting that her father hadn’t let anyone visit him at home for more than a decade. There was a caved-in roof that let in that day’s pouring rain; black mold growing on mounds of unopened mail and snaking down the rain-soaked walls; evidence of, as the police so delicately put it, “rodent activity.”

She'd done some reading about hoarding, she told me, to try and understand her father, and had discovered there are basically three types of hoarders. As she launched into her description, I took tiny sips of tea and listened intently, steeling myself as I though I were walking toward the flesh house. Walking toward it and seeing the door ajar.

“First of all,” my friend said, “there are the people who have suffered great losses and can’t bear to lose anything more—even a piece of paper.” Her father fit this profile: He'd lost his career, his marriage, and several close relatives around the time the hoarding kicked into high gear.

I tried not to show my relief. Not like me, not like me! sang a little tune in my head.

The second type of hoarders are people who invest enormous emotional significance in objects and can’t bear to throw them away.

“For example,” she said, lifting the clear plastic cup that contained the remains of her iced coffee, “I might think, ‘This cup will always remind me of my conversation at the coffee shop with my good friend Karen, so I’ll take it home and keep it forever.'”

We shared a half smile, half grimace at the absurdity of this thought. I relaxed a little.

“What about the third type?” I asked.

“Oh, they’re the perfectionists,” she said. “They save things because they envision dealing with them in some complicated way that will take more time and effort than they ever seem to have.”

Uh-oh. I pictured the decade-plus of kids' art projects in boxes in a corner of my family room, the ones I intend to sort through someday and divide into recycle, display items, and works to be photographed and stored digitally. I felt an urge to bolt from the table, zoom home, and throw something out—pronto!

At the same time, I began guiltily making mental notes, itching to use the details in what I was already thinking of as “the flesh house essay.”

After which, I went home, cleaned off my dresser top, and didn’t write anything for days.

Scavenging Beauty

What is it with this need to hold onto things—physical objects, energy, ideas and memories—and not let go of them easily? Is it always wrongheaded, or might it have a good side, especially for a writer?

I did a little research online (because, you know, I needed to gather enough information to do this right). I found support for much of what my friend had described in transcripts of talks by psychologist and hoarding expert Randy Frost. But I also discovered reverberations of artistry.

“Look at these bottle caps,” Frost quotes a woman as saying. “Aren’t they beautiful? Look at their shapes and colors.” When asked what she would be wasting if she threw them away, she said it would be the color and shape of the bottle caps.

Reading this, I thought of Henry James’s famous words of advice in The Art of Fiction. He said that would-be writers should try to be “those on whom nothing is lost.” Even something as small as the taste of a madeleine crumb might contain an emotional charge that triggers an entire fictional world (in seven volumes, if you’re Marcel Proust).

The appreciation hoarders have for things—their usefulness, their beauty, their emotional resonance—reminds me, in a way, of how writers appreciate experience. Instead of simply passing through the events and sensations of our lives, we writers hold onto them: We collect them and view them imaginatively, considering how to turn them into art so they won’t be lost from the world. So they won’t be wasted.

It’s a tempting comparison. However, it ignores one crucial point: What’s stored must be used; otherwise, it’s wasted anyway. Worse than wasted, because it builds up into a carapace—a dangerous, heavy, constricting shell inside which it’s impossible to move.

The Lightness of Letting Go

When people fail to discard physical items, it’s easy to define when their behavior has tipped over into hoarding. Their rooms become so cluttered that the space can’t be used; their ability to function in the world is threatened.

With material to be written about, it’s not so simple.

How do you tell the difference between an idea that you’re not yet ready to write about—one that needs more time to ripen—and one you’re hoarding? How do you know when it’s time to stop accumulating related content and to start writing, already?

Here’s what I know: After some period of not writing about it, an idea that once darted around my brain will lose momentum and grind slowly to a halt. I'll think of it less and less—perhaps because its moment has passed and it’s no longer timely, perhaps because the energy needed to get it moving again starts to seem insurmountable. I may even start to feel, as my thoughts tiptoe past it, the same sense of fear and dread that's so often clutched me when my dog pulls me past the flesh house.

It’s scary, emptying thoughts into the world as words. When they’re still in my head—my own “flesh house”—I can savor their potential. I can gather them around me and feel full of possibility. Unwritten, they can never fail to live up to my vision of them. But they can also never succeed. And, over time, their heaviness weighs me down.

At this moment, though, I'm savoring a different feeling: the lightness of having finally put into words what I wanted to say. When I walked by the flesh house today, I witnessed a small, coincidental sign of life—a window cracked open and the sound of voices. I feel cracked open, too, and emptied, but buoyant in my emptiness. I am moving on.

Publication Information

“Compulsive Hoarding,” edited transcript of a talk given by Dr. Randy O. Frost on January 19, 2004, at a conference put on by the New York City Task Force on Hoarding (“When Hoarding Causes Suffering—Working Together to Address a Multi-Faceted Problem”).
Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things by Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010).
"Hoarding: When Too Much ‘Stuff’ Causes Grief,” NPR “Fresh Air” interview with psychologists Randy Frost and Gail Steketee on May 5, 2010.
"The Art of Fiction" by Henry James, originally published in Longman's Magazine in 1884 as a response to a lecture by Walter Besant (both pieces appear in The Art of Fiction, first published by Cupples, Upham, 1885).

Art Information

Karen J. Ohlson is a senior editor at Talking Writing.

Karen would like to thank the friend who recounted the tale of her father’s hoarding and allowed it to be used here. She would also like to thank the TW editors who, by assigning her this topic, indirectly caused her finally to tackle her backlog of piles, filling a large recycling bin to the brim twice. Her husband insists he didn’t bribe Talking Writing.

"Here, at the sold-out, sole Northern California event in John and Hank Green’s 2012 North American tour, Microphone Man is prompting the crowd to shout, on the count of three, 'We love you, John!'—which many do, giddily." — "John Green's 'Tour de Nerdfighters'"