A little less than a year ago, I’d been standing in my bedroom surrounded by broken glass, crying my eyes out, convinced that I was useless and worthless. Since then I’d travelled halfway around the world, met incredible people, learnt to stand up for myself and bought a house. It was hard to believe that I’d ever thought I was unable to cope on my own.
I admired the neat stack of twenty-four boxes again. I’d never felt so good about being brought down to size.
A week later I was sitting on Adam’s kitchen bench, swinging my legs back and forth and showing off.
‘What do you mean you’ve finished packing?’ Adam was standing at the stove, stirring something that he insisted was going to be a roux. I had expected him to be overcome with admiration when I told him that five weeks out from settlement on my new house I was living with just one set of sheets and one bath towel. I was expecting the usual ‘Good girl!’, which he said in the same way most people praised a dog that had finally learnt how to sit on command.
‘How are you living? What are you washing with? Why did you pack away your towels?’ Maybe he was just miffed because I hadn’t asked him to help.
‘I didn’t pack the towels on purpose, I just needed them to put around the breakables. I kept out some of my clothes and my toiletries.’
He made some kind of sniffing noise and kept stirring.
‘When are we going shopping then?’
I stared at him in amazement.
‘I don’t need to buy anything, Adam, I’m a reformed hoarder. If I was an alcoholic would you be offering me a drink?’
‘So you’re going to drag the old chair of Thomas’ and the old coffee table of Thomas’ and the old rug of Thomas’ and you’re going to set them all up in your new house, are you? You’re going to keep dragging him around with you? Good girrrrrrl.’
There was a buzzing in my ears. I couldn’t believe I still had stuff that belonged to Thomas. How had I missed that? Perhaps I was suffering from hoarder’s blindness again. It hadn’t occurred to me that those things had originally belonged to him—in fact, they almost seemed to belong to the apartment, not to Thomas—that was the only reason I could fathom for having kept such obvious reminders of him in the house. Not willing to keep those things for even a second longer, I pulled out my mobile phone, rang the Brotherhood of St Laurence and arranged a home pick-up to take the furniture away the next day.
‘Done!’ I smiled smugly.
‘You realise that means you’re going to be living without a coffee table for the next month and a half?’
I stopped swinging my legs. ‘ . . . yes.’ I faltered. ‘I did it on purpose.’
For the next five weeks I ate my dinner off my lap and fantasised about how I was going to set up the new place: all my CDs and DVDs would go in the drawers beneath the stairs; I no longer needed the big entertainment unit I had stored them in because I’d given half of them away. The towels would fit in the little space below the wash basin in the bathroom; they didn’t need a whole shelf in a wardrobe anymore. The cupboard downstairs would hold my ladder, brooms, suitcases and other big things. Everything else would fit in the built-ins in the two bedrooms. I clapped my hands excitedly and counted down the days until I left this apartment and its ghosts behind forever.
On a warm day in late summer I sat out on the balcony, killing time until the removalists arrived. I wandered around aimlessly, picking buds off the bougainvillea spilling over the railings and scuffing little bits of dirt through the cracks in the decking. Normally I spent the morning of a move cramming my car with ‘special things’ that I was scared the removalists might break. This time, I’d carefully placed a few delicate vases and framed photos in the boot and that was all. I was done. I looked at my watch. I even had enough time spare to make one final trip to the op shop.
This was a job I had been saving for a few days. It was something that I’d wanted to do on my last day in this flat, if I had enough time, to really signify that I was ending one thing and beginning another. I’d received a flyer in the mail earlier in the week from the Brotherhood of St Laurence. They were starting up a second-hand bookstore to help fund their work. It was perfect timing: I had one more possession that needed to go.
I drove to the Brotherhood, went inside and handed over the Bastard Man’s book. Someone else could read it now. That was the best legacy I could leave on his behalf: he could bring someone else joy. I drove back home with tears in my eyes, laughing at my sentimentality.
When the removalists arrived, I calmly stood back and watched them carry everything out to the van. I didn’t feel embarrassed about the amount of belongings I had, I wasn’t still packing madly and I wasn’t on the verge of a nervous breakdown and acting like I might throw myself down the stairs at any moment.
When we arrived at the new house, the hardest thing we had to do was carry my bed up the staircase to the second level. There were no broken things to be handled carefully through the front door, no half-dead pot plants or ancient electrical equipment and no heavy bags of old clothes, skulking around like would-be criminals.
By mid-afternoon I was standing in the middle of my own house, furniture in all the right places and boxes in the right rooms ready to be unpacked. I sat down on the edge of the step leading from the kitchen to the lounge and looked around. It was still hard to believe I owned this place.
It took me less than a week to unpack properly. And amazingly, along the way, more stuff went: clothes, books, linen, trinkets. I’d only been in my new place a few days and already I was leaving bits of furniture out the front with signs saying ‘free to good home’.
When I was finished, everything had a place and there was even room to spare. I had turned into the kind of person who could live comfortably without much storage. It was as if I had sprouted wings and learnt how to fly.
About five of the boxes I moved were filled with memorabilia and ephemera. They were labelled and stacked neatly in the wardrobe in the study, next to my tax documents and photo albums. Five boxes may still have been a lot to some people, but it was only one-fifth of what I had been hoarding originally. Now that the idea no longer scared me, I would no doubt go through them again in the near future and throw out even more. It didn’t matter to me that I wasn’t a perfect Level One or Two, it didn’t matter that I still had some stuff that was probably worthless to other people, what mattered was that for the first time ever, I controlled the stuff instead of the stuff controlling me.
Friends came to visit and oohed and aaahed at my parquetry floors and dishwasher. Adam showed up with a bottle of champagne and we drank it in the courtyard, sunning ourselves in the last of the day’s rays and picking little bits of clover from between the pavers. Wendy came around and offered to help me drill holes for picture hooks in the walls.
‘You’ve got to do something to mark it as your own, Corinne.’ She grinned at me. ‘It’s not your house until you make a hole in it.’
It usually took months before anywhere new truly felt like my own and not the place of someone else with my stuff in it. Wendy was right, I needed to do something to make it mine. However, this was no mere rental and, as such, it needed a grand gesture. It needed a house-warming. I looked around. I could have a really big party here.
I wrote out the names of all the people I wanted to invite. Then I scrolled through my computer address book, just in case there was anyone I had forgotten. Katie’s email address popped out. I had bumped into my childhood friend from Corryong in the city one day about a month ago. She still looked the same, with red hair and a big, carefree smile. It was so good to see her again. We’d swapped details and promised to keep in touch. Now seemed like the perfect time to do exactly that. I added her name to the list.
In total, I sent out twenty-five invitations. Twenty-five would be the capacity this house could hold before it started to feel like we were all trapped in a shipping container. I designed a little invitation, put together a group email and hit the send button.
It hadn’t occurred to me that throwing a big party might be stressful. I’d always imagined it would be a little bit like a 1950s movie and I’d be swanning around like Doris Day, making people martinis and belting out show tunes. Instead, I was running around a party supply store grabbing plastic cups, disposable ashtrays and industrial-strength stain remover. I flitted through the house cherry-picking anything I thought looked either dangerous or easily swallowed by a child or Adam. To my surprise, I effortlessly found room for all of the breakables in my wardrobe upstairs. The concept of ‘spare space’ was still new to me, and on the day of the party I lost half an hour of precious preparation time staring in wonder at my neatly arranged bedroom wardrobe.
Katie and her husband were amongst the first to arrive and I placed their bottles of wine in the ice-packed bath, poured them each a glass of champagne then grabbed them by the wrists and pulled them upstairs for a tour. I was, perhaps, a little over-eager.
‘You can look in anything—anything!’ I said, opening the bedroom door. ‘All the drawers and cupboards are neat and tidy!’ I dragged them back down to the kitchen. ‘Look in here, there’s just glasses! Just glasses!’ Adam planted his hands on my shoulders.
‘Corinne, maybe you should calm down and have a gin and tonic. Or a Valium. Let me welcome the guests, okay? There’s really no need to force people to look in your bathroom vanity.’
He was right. I hadn’t seen Katie properly in years. It was probably best if I didn’t behave as if I was still eight years old.
As more people turned up, I left Adam to shepherd them around. Back in the bad old days, I never would have allowed people to tramp around my place unaccompanied; they might have walked into the bedroom and discovered the forty tonnes of stuff that had been removed from the lounge and dumped on the bed, or they might have opened a cabinet door and been concussed by an avalanche of cassette tapes by Roxette and New Kids on the Block.
‘Mi casa, su casa! ’ I yelled gaily as Adam took a couple up the stairs. He rolled his eyes at me.
However, as more and more people arrived, I started to worry. I was getting dangerously close to capacity and there were still more guests to come. A few people rang to cancel and I accepted their apologies with relief. If three or four more people turned up right now, I would have to walk outside and shove them in with my feet.
The party, which had started in the early afternoon, went until after midnight, and Katie was there right until the end. I was glad she’d stayed; with so many people in the house, I hadn’t had a chance to talk to her properly. Now we were sitting on the lounge-room floor, reminiscing and laughing hysterically about the ridiculous things we had done as children. Although we’d both had far too much to drink already, Katie refilled our glasses with the last of the wine.
‘Do you remember the time we were trying to be like the Famous Five? We chased that panel van down the street because we were convinced the guy who drove it was a kidnapper.’ She was giggling helplessly.
‘If he actually had been a kidnapper, why were we following him?’ I was almost as floppy with laughter as she was and I was having trouble holding my glass still.
‘Or that time we tried to record our own version of The Man From Snowy River and we had to give up because we kept giggling over the line “all the cracks had gathered to the fray”? Remember? We thought it meant a lot of bum cracks riding horses. It was the funniest thing in the world to us back then.’
‘I think I’ve drunk enough to still think it’s the funniest thing in the world.’
We kept telling old stories and laughing until our sides hurt.
Katie looked at me, grinning.
‘I’m really glad we’ve got back in contact, Corinne.’
I grabbed her hand. ‘Me too.’
I thought of the little girl I had been—back when I was that nervous, skinny kid who wouldn’t let anyone borrow her pencils in case one of them went missing and the world ended. Now here I was in my own house, sitting on the floor surrounded by empty bottles and not even bothering to check if the parquetry had been scratched, if there were marks on the walls or if anything had been broken.
After Katie left, I sat on the couch and grinned. I was the kind of person who had friends and parties and a tidy house. I was the kind of person I’d always wanted to be.
Late the following afternoon, Adam came around to help with the cleaning up. There wasn’t much to do; I’d finished most of it the night before in an effort to sober up. As we were fossicking in the courtyard for cigarette stubs, he pulled something out of a shrub and looked at me, concerned.
‘Are you okay with this?’
He was holding up a broken champagne glass. I frowned.
‘It’s just a glass.’
He squealed.
‘Oh my god! Can you imagine saying “it’s just a glass” a year ago? I probably would have got a phone call from you in the middle of the night, crying about how that glass reminded you of some kid from high school, or your nanna’s cat or something.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘I wasn’t that bad, Adam.’
‘Do you remember the time you accidentally chipped the corner of a wooden pencil case you’d made in year nine?’
‘Oh. Okay, maybe I was that bad.’
‘You nearly threw yourself out the bedroom window!’
I laughed. ‘Oh, shut up. And put that glass down before you cut yourself. I don’t want the decking stained with your blood.’
He left that night and I sat down in my new study, staring out the little window to the alleyway behind. I hadn’t checked my email in two days and was expecting a deluge of junk mail to delete. As the advertisements for dodgy electronics, even dodgier medications and the offers to ‘make it last all night’ scrolled down my screen, I noticed an email from Jordan. That was weird, I hadn’t heard from him since I’d returned from Bali.
Hello Australian! You sent a message for another Jordan! Or do you want me to come to Australia?
I’d accidentally sent him an invite to my house-warming instead of sending it to a friend with the same name in Australia. I smiled at his broken English, still a hundred times better than my French.
So what is new? My friend has a boat in Bali and we are going for it in October. Why for you not making this cruise with us?
I looked around my study. Here were my books, all neatly in their shelves, here were my wardrobe doors, closing easily and storing the things I truly cherished. Here was the house that I had bought, the stuff that I loved, the memories that meant the most. There was nothing holding me back. I smiled and thought to myself, Why for not indeed?
Twenty-Two Lessons in Letting Go
Here is a list of the things I learnt during the year it took me to de-hoard my life. It’s certainly not a finite list; I’m still learning now. That’s the great thing about getting to the bottom of all your junk: you get to the bottom of yourself at the same time. If you’re a hoarder, maybe you’ll find something here that will help.
On the other hand, if you’re not sure whether you’re a hoarder, here’s a little test that might help: if someone gave you this book as a gift, they were trying to tell you something.
1 You don’t need to travel to the Middle East, lose your best friend or discover an old man has died to find the motivation to start de-hoarding. (Frankly, I went a bit overboard.) But you do need to sit down and figure out why you are holding on to things in the first place. Is it fear? Regret? Guilt? Is it something else
? Can you remedy these things? If not, is holding on to the object doing anything other than causing you more pain? Ask yourself questions, write about it, talk with friends. Once you’ve made sense of why you hoard, the letting go will be much easier.
2 Don’t tackle the really painful stuff first, you’ll only discourage yourself. Work up to it. You’ll find you get tougher the longer you stick at it and, eventually, you’ll build up the emotional equivalent of abs of steel. Once you’ve done that, then you can revisit the painful things without worrying that you’ll end up sitting in a corner rocking back and forth.
3 This is not going to take a day or two like it does on TV—not if you want to do it properly and get to the bottom of why you hoard in the first place. Don’t set yourself unrealistic goals about getting things done in record time. Instead, just promise yourself to keep going, steadily and regularly, until you reach your goal. Think of it as weight loss for your house.
4 Once you’ve made the decision to throw something out, throwing out similar things will be easy. Keep one item that reminds you of a particular time and place (your time machine) and get rid of the rest. You might still end up with a bag of clothing or knick-knacks but if you’re anything like me, you had ten bags of the crap to start with, so you’re miles ahead. Also, when there’s only one bag left, revisiting it and throwing out more in the future won’t seem like such a daunting task. That one bag may eventually whittle itself down to just a couple of things.
5 Brace yourself for this one: like an alcoholic, you will always be a hoarder. However, you can become a reformed hoarder. Keep an eye on yourself, watch that cupboards don’t start filling up again. Keep a bag for charity on the go at all times. (I actually use an old clothes hamper.) Have a regular spot for it, maybe in the bottom of a wardrobe, or beside your desk. That way, whenever you happen upon something that you are ready to let go of, you can do it immediately. Too often we see things in drawers or cupboards and think to ourselves, ‘Next time I do a clean-out, I’ll throw that away.’ The problem is, if you’re saying that forty-five times a day, you’re never going to remember all the things to ditch. So ditch them now. You’ll be surprised how quickly your regular charity bag fills up. I probably do a run to the op shop once every three months and it feels good every time.
Lessons in Letting Go Page 21