Confessions of a Stagnant Pool

I first heard from God on the subject of clutter about the time my son, Brian, was born. I forget (and sometimes remember, but forget again) whether it was before or after he was born. However, it was either when my wife, Suzanne, was pregnant with him or shortly after she delivered him to me.

What He said was: "Michael, you need to unclutter your life." I took that to mean that I had to clean up our house and get it ready to house an infant. That was part of it, certainly, but not nearly all. He was telling me to simplify my life and get rid of things and activities that do not serve to speed me toward my goals.

He told me, in another time of greater clarity, to be more like a river than a pool: "Don't hang onto your ideas or your creations. Give them away. Don't hold onto your wealth. Give that away as well. If you try to save your life by hoarding it, you will find that it decays when you are not watching it. If you give it away for My sake, you will find that it lasts forever. This is what is meant by "ever-lasting life."

In the narrative that follows, I refer to "SUDs". This is a therapeutic term that is actually an acronym for "Subjective Units of Distress". While removing clutter from our homes, we participants are asked to record our SUDs every five minutes. That way, we are constantly aware of just how much anxiety we experience while attempting to discard belongings that have outlived their usefulness to us.

When I began attending the Hoarding Disorder treatment class at the VA, I didn't know what to expect. After my first session, I was a bit puzzled. “If my problem arises,” I questioned, “from anxiety associated with getting rid of things, how can raising my SUDs level ameliorate it?” I figured that the way to treat the Disorder must be somehow getting rid of my anxiety, not increasing it.

I am happy to report, having attended for twelve (12) sessions now, that I have turned a corner in my treatment. I understand the premise of the class. It is not simply a matter of reducing anxiety associated with discarding hoarded clutter. It is more a matter of reducing the clutter itself, thereby experiencing the anxiety, and getting used to experiencing it.

By becoming habituated to experiencing—and surviving—that “loss anxiety”, I learn that the anxiety itself is neither crippling nor fatal. I can both survive and function although anxious. What I cannot do is continue to function in a cluttered home.

The clutter in our home both incapacitates me (mentally) and stresses me (emotionally). If I am to grow personally and professionally, I must have an uncluttered home.

Moreover, I have learned that exiting the cycles of rationalization that led to our clutter problems in the first place has forced me to confront some uncomfortable truths. Perhaps the greatest of these is the fact that getting rid of stuff that I never use anyway does not result in a loss of value. Inversely, not getting rid of it results in a loss of value.

I decided to purchase a home for two reasons:
a. to hold onto more of my money's value, rather than pass it on to a landlord;
b. to have a place where I can entertain friends and minister to my community.

As it is, I have neither of those things because my house is occupied by clutter. Instead, I provide housing for junk and never invite anyone over because I am ashamed of the clutter. My home consists of 1,034 square feet of living space. For that, I pay a mortgage payment of $705.01 and a Homeowners' Association fee of $307.00 per month. That's an average cost of about 98 cents per square foot per month. Of those, about 400 square feet are occupied by junk. That means that I am paying an average of $392.00 each and every month to store items that neither I nor any member of my household ever uses! Talk about losing value!

We have lived in this house for just over fourteen (14) years. That is equivalent to 168 months. In that time, we have paid more than $65,856.00 to store junk mail, toys our son has outgrown, books we never read, movies we never watch, kitchen- and table-ware that we never use, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. In truth, we easily could have purchased many times the value of the stuff we could toss without ever missing it for that much money.

Moreover, had we just tossed the superfluous stuff, we easily could have held onto jobs that we have lost, attended functions that we missed, and saved untold opportunities to earn more spending power than we have saved by refusing to toss it. Had we saved rather than squandered that value (arguably, we wouldn't have actually saved the money, just its value), we might have even managed to remodel and refurnish our home!

Instead, endlessly bickering about the relative worth of the stuff versus the space it occupies, we are on the verge of getting a divorce and having to replace our one cramped, common home with two even-more-cramped, separate ones. To me, the solution to this dilemma is so obvious it bites. Just get rid of the junk already and we'll each have more room to ourselves! It's a no-brainer! Once we simplify our lives and learn to live within our means, we will be better able to acquire—and keep—jobs that will enable us to purchase, not only a bigger home but whatever furnishings we had to sacrifice in order to attain that self-sufficiency in the first place. Hopefully, in that process, we will discover that we don't really miss the “stuff” after all.