Nostalgia, Hoarding, and the Ever-Expanding World of Things
Sentimentality in a consumerist world
With the plate-sized CD player of my childhood in my hands, its cheap plastic buttons clack inward stiffly as I slide my fingers across its shoddily-made surface. I know that it will never play another CD again in its life here on this dusty shelf; I’m not even sure that it still works. But in this clunky old heirloom from a not-so-distant past, I can feel a world unfurl.
It might seem like a piece of junk to some, but to me, it’s one of the most enduring bridges between who I was and who I am now. In its dusty blue and its grayed white, I can almost see an old CD spinning and I remember the melodies that it used to play.
When most people envision hoarding, it’s the walls piled high with junk and the electrical hazards and the feces-ridden floors. It’s true that the advent of shows like “Hoarders,” “Hoarding: Buried Alive,” and “Britain’s Biggest Hoarders” have done the malady little justice.
But the truth is that the hoarding disorder is actually fairly common. The American Psychiatric Association found that between 2–6% of people struggle with hoarding.
You don’t need to be a packrat with a house piled high with newspaper clippings dating back decades in order to be a hoarder. According to The Mayo Clinic, “Hoarding disorder is an ongoing difficulty throwing away or parting with possessions because you believe that you need to save them. You may experience distress at the thought of getting rid of the items…” The criteria is broader than many may realize.
Though I’m far from the worst, hoarding disorder is something that I actually struggle with a lot. It’s not something that plagues each moment of my life, but it’s enough that cleaning and organizing can sometimes present serious obstacles.
When I was new to Medium, I was tagged in a writing challenge whereby writers were supposed to talk about their writing space and what made it special for them. I decided to read a few of the articles of other people tagged in the prompt. But as they spoke about their rooms looking out on bays and their organized desk spaces and their serene study areas, I started to realize that the task ahead for me wasn’t quite so easy.
My writing space is a bizarre one. As I began to talk about the elaborate assortment of glass sculptures and the meticulously arranged entertainment center and the walls adorned fully with a menagerie of color and culture and humor and memories, I realized I needed to shelve the draft and set it aside for another day. I don’t imagine it’s many writers with a space quite like mine.
The clean writing space has never been a priority for me. While I don’t strive for chaos, I’m an unrepentant lover of things and I enjoy being near them. I love to be reminded of the wide array of music contained within the records in cases placed carefully about my room. I love the pictures of friends. I love to look at the covers of video games and being transported into the virtual worlds of my earliest years — even if only for a moment.
And when it comes to cleaning, I search for the silliest rationales to hold onto my ever-growing assortment of miscellany. I can stand to throw out a receipt from 2017, or a wrapper to an old candy, but sometimes the wristband to a festival I went to for a day in 2019 is a possession I’d rather not part with. Even so many of the items that I know I’ll never use again I find reasons to keep.
Maybe I know I’ll never play this game again, or that the old CD player in that corner is a device from another time, or that the person in this photograph is gone from my life forever. But I still find warmth in the keepsakes. I still find value in the memories of who I once was.
It’s no easy time in the world to cut down on the pervasion of things in our lives. We live in a culture of consumerism. To even be alive in the modern age is to constantly parse between which cables charge which devices and which remotes go to which TV, stereo, surround sound or Roku.
The thinking even extends into the digital world. Encased within my phone are memories that date back well over a decade. The notes and photos and videos and old apps are all there as though they never left. And in truth, they never have. The memes I’ve saved and the conversations I’ve had and the memories I wanted to catalogue forever each hover idly in a cloud. I can hardly bear the thought of erasing even the discussions that have long fled my mind. I can’t stand the idea of erasing the days that I no longer even afford space in my mental hard drive.
There’s value in forgotten memories, but our storage capacity is limited.
To clean my room is to find proof of days I’d forgotten entirely. Stuck to the bottom of dusty drawers is the evidence of a person I am no longer. Inside of old envelopes are letters from people I no longer pay mind to. Encapsulated in old files on undiscarded computers are the rough drafts of some of my earliest writing. They sit alongside an arsenal of electronics that have long outstayed their welcome, but that I’m happy all the same to remember still exist.
Maybe it’s just that I’ve been nostalgic ever since I had memories to be nostalgic about. Maybe there really will come a day when I’m glad to have my MP3 player from 2nd grade. And maybe I’m just living in a growing pile of useless junk. But when I hold that tawdry old relic in my hands again, I can feel the child in me skipping through a LimeWire-burned CD to get to my favorite songs. When I flip through the books of my childhood, I hear a younger me eagerly asking my father questions about the pictures on each page.
Perhaps one day I might find joy in a minimalist existence, but for now, I take solace in my cluttered little sanctuary. As the author Robert Brault once wrote, “Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.” My collection, in all its chaotic glory, serves as a continuous reminder of the ‘little things’ that have shaped me and the parts of myself that I’d still like to hold onto.