Behind closed doors - just let it go – not so easily done!

Just let it Go

I am editing and purging; let me clarify, stuff not food.  Wilfrida’s Closet started as a way to combine amazing amounts of strange items that Wilfrida had accumulated through the years with my need to do something distracting.

Wilfrida was an odd saver and collector, based on need, thrift and a great eye.  A pioneer re-purposer, sale shower curtains were ready to be taken out and used to cover the house should Guido paint again.  The fact that neither of them were painting our house was of no consequence, the shower curtains were on hand – just in case.  My argument; there would be no painting even if the mood hit, because the paint police would have arrested Guido in a heartbeat.

The visible areas in the house were lovely, a source of joy for Wilfrida and everyone that visited.  People always commented on how comfortable they felt in the environment she created.  But behind the scenes; in drawers and closets, holy moley, beware of closed doors.   I have used the greens stamps she saved in my cards.

 

I too suffer from behind closed doors.  Call and ask if I still have a form that was used 15 years ago and sadly the answer is yes.  Remember the picture we used on a photo shoot 10 years ago, I remember it, and god forgive me, I have it.  

My challenge has been to adios what is not needed because I have staged and cleaned out homes of others for years.  I am good at it except for me. And now we are moving and I am singing the adios tune.

I have decided hoarding takes many forms, not just stuff. As an only child family gatherings were always interesting to me, not just my family, any family that I visited.  I was the observer, the person behind the glass window in the police interrogation room.

As family dinners progressed there seemed to be a point that siblings started to regress. Several siblings were headed down a happy memory lane and suddenly a third one was headed down a dark and scary lane.  My conclusion: everyone has there own reality and the really unhappy relative remembers every bad incident, real or not and stores them just like stuff.

Italian family dinners were an audit, all would be jolly and then the one unforgiveable injustice would be taken out of the box relived, remembered, and put away for the next family event.  Of course there were operatic tendencies, solos, arias, and choruses.  It still seems like hoarding to me.

What about telling the same stories over and over about work or the family and not replacing them with new ones, isn’t that hoarding?  Listing everything that has gone wrong in life to validate the premise – “see this always happens to me.” Conversation over, no logic is needed; the truth has been declared, proven by the storage unit of past wrongs.

So my stuff, not so bad!  I can easily move it out and away, in fact I am.  But the storage units and filled luggage of old stories, bad stories that people fill up empty space with are not so easily given away.  Rather than the houses we see on the show Hoarding…I think of the hearts and bodies that are crammed with sadness.

Anyone need anything…Wilfrida’s paint/shower curtains perhaps, they must be here somewhere.  Act fast everything goes!