Junk

by Alison Stewart

  So how did these items wind up at a yard sale in Englewood, Tennessee?

  Cora worked in New York until she was one hundred years old, and then retired. She moved to Tennessee to be near her family. You see, Phyllis from the yard sale is married to one of the twins Cora helped raise since they were little boys.

  Eight years had passed since Cora was laid to rest in Tennessee, and Phyllis felt it was time to move on a bit. These were some of the things someone else might enjoy owning. Someone like me, who could not believe a nearly one-hundred-year-old lecture from my alma mater was sitting on a card table on a roadside in Tennessee. I was frightened to ask her how much she wanted for the lecture booklet. It looked so perfect and old. I braced for the price. “That’s two dollars.” Her trash was my treasure.

  A week later I was at Brown attending a dinner where the chancellor of the university was celebrating his sixtieth birthday. He is totally devoted to the school and donates millions, sometimes anonymously. He is a man who rereads the school’s charter just for pleasure. His family is listed by Forbes as the forty-fourth richest clan in the United States. They are worth billions. I decided to give him the lecture as a gift. He lit up at the sight of it and kissed me twice as a thank you. He’d never seen anything like it. To Phyllis in Tennessee it was nothing much, just something taking up space. It had no value to her; it was worthless. It was junk. Yet to a billionaire from New York City, it was priceless.

  2

  PACK RATS

  (HUMAN AND OTHERWISE)

  * * *

  “PLEASE DON’T LUMP us collectors in with those people.” The plea was from a sixty-something former schoolteacher who heard about my research and approached me at a library. It was clear that she did not want to be associated with a group of people who were doing something in her mind that was, well, unpleasant.

  She was not wrong to call for the delineation. Professionals working in the fields of psychology, life coaching, and organizing make a distinction between collectors and clutterers. Collectors “buy and sell according to a mission” and make “rational choices” when they buy.1 There is a certain level of connoisseurship associated with collecting. Collectors keep their possessions in a controlled environment and display them appropriately. A study of 192 collectors from around the world noted that “items are treated with extreme care and are often employed ritually or on special ceremonial occasions.”2 One in three people collect something: coins for numismatists, stamps by philatelists, and shells by conchologists.

  Formal collections date back to the Babylonians (2000 BC). In Europe the accumulation and display of collections for personal expression became popularized around the Renaissance.3 Collections were kept in a room called a wunderkammern, which translated into “cabinet of curiosities.” A wunderkammern could be filled with bones, insects, art, or a mix of items—just about anything the collector deemed exciting. This kind of hobby-based collecting became wildly fashionable a century later in the Victorian age, especially among the British upper classes. The problem with some of the British collectors is they gathered things that belonged to other people. To this day (as of late 2015) Greece is still fighting for the return of a “collection” of figures called the Elgin Marbles. Lord Elgin, the British ambassador to Constantinople, “discovered” some statues at the Parthenon in Athens and decided to take them home for his own “collection” in the UK. Or, as the BBC put it, “He removed whole boatloads of ancient sculpture.”4 Elgin sold the works to the British government in 1816, and the stone artifacts are still in the British Museum. Greece would really like them back. And by the way, in Greece they are known as the Parthenon Marbles, thank you very much.

  Famous collectors include Sigmund Freud, who owned twenty-three hundred ancient Roman, Greek, and Egyptian artifacts.5 David Geffen, the cofounder of DreamWorks Animation, owns the world’s most valuable private art collection, valued at $1.1 billion, which is approximately 20 percent of his financial worth.6 I know a television personality who has a million-dollar baseball card, just one of his large portfolio. Collecting is a mash up of conscious consumerism and passion. While psychologists note that collecting is an “unrelenting need, a hunger for acquisition,”7 at its most benign it is a hobby, and at its most extreme it can be an obsession. It is not a disorder, like hoarding.

  Hoarding is its own distinct condition and is recognized as such by mental health professionals. Originally lumped in with obsessive compulsive disorder, hoarding was recently given its own classification in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) published in 2013, thanks to investment in research and more awareness about its destructive nature. The DSM is the official guide for evaluating and coding mental health issues. It now describes hoarding this way:

  Hoarding disorder is characterized by the persistent difficulty discarding or parting with possessions, regardless of the value others may attribute to these possessions. The behavior usually has harmful effects—emotional, physical, social, financial, and even legal—for the person suffering from the disorder and family members. For individuals who hoard, the quantity of their collected items sets them apart from people with normal collecting behaviors. They accumulate a large number of possessions that often fill up or clutter active living areas of the home or workplace to the extent that their intended use is no longer possible.

  Hoarding affects an estimated 2 to 4 percent of the population. It is an extreme condition. But as with most extremes, there are many people whose lives aren’t endangered by milder similar actions. But while those lesser actions may not be destructive, they can be problematic in everyday life. When it comes to the accumulation issues, the Institute for Challenging Disorganization seeks to help them.

  The Institute for Challenging Disorganization (ICD) began as the National Study Group for Chronic Disorganization in the early 1990s. ICD has a mission to educate, research, explore, and develop strategies to help train professionals who work with civilians who are overwhelmed by their possessions. These pros are on the frontlines researching and trying to understand why some people are more susceptible to clutter issues. The group researches the intertwining of identity and objects, especially possessions. It considers situational factors and brain-based conditions.

  So what does it mean to be chronically disorganized? According to ICD, it is usually someone who accumulates “large quantities of objects, documents, papers, or possessions beyond apparent necessity or pleasure.” Someone who is challenged by disorganization has probably tried, unsuccessfully, to change his or her ways. Factors associated with chronic disorganization can be as simple as environmental challenges like inadequate storage. Attitudes and beliefs including perfectionism often lead to things remaining undone or unused until the action can be accomplished “correctly.” According to ICD, overscheduling, compulsive acquisition, information processing deficits, and disruptive life transitions can all lead to severe disorganization.

  Linda Samuels, the 2014–2016 president of ICD, isn’t antipossession at all. “I don’t think it is so odd that we define ourselves by certain objects. If you think about your space, you have things around, colors you like. What you see is the variation in the volume. And whether the stuff is enhancing your daily experience or it is causing stress. That’s the dividing line. The fact that we are attached to our things I don’t find odd at all. Is it preventing you from living the life you want, doing what you want, causing problems with family? That’s the slippery slope.”

  It is also a matter of perception, as she found out in her early days as a professional organizer. She had a client call her in a panic. The person was distraught about a desk. When Samuels arrived to evaluate the scene, her client had a few stray pieces of paper. That was the emergency. The story points to the role individuality plays into all of this. “It has nothing to do with what I see—it has to do with how they feel about it and how they perceive it. Whether it is a few pieces of paper or whether it is truly a room you can’t walk in . . . that�
�s where I am starting.”

  Samuels is a tiny woman with ringlets of black curls and an enormous smile. When we meet she has a bright folder with my name on it containing our correspondence and some information she thought I might like. Organized. She’s bright eyed, energetic, empathetic, and sincere in a way that would flummox the truly cynical. Barely able to see over the podium, she is warmly greeted as she presides over the ICD annual conference in Nashville, Tennessee. The conference is a two-pronged event. There are professional organizers, social workers, and educators who are there to take exams to earn a certification from the group. Then there are hours-long lectures that will present new ideas and perspectives on what insiders call CD for short.

  Dr. Russell Barkley spent four hours exploring the connection between attention deficit issues and chronic disorganization. Dr. Barkley is a clinical psychologist with a long pedigree. He was professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and is currently a professor at the Medical University of South Carolina. This was one of his last small, private conference lectures and it was titled “ADHD, Self Regulation & Executive Functioning.” He wanted the group to consider that ADHD could easily be present in some of their clients. He discussed some of the behaviors associated with ADD and ADHD, such as poor persistence toward goals and being easily distractible, and how those behaviors might be a factor in their clients’ concerns. He also made the case that ADHD can disrupt the executive functioning of the brain, and in turn executive functioning can disrupt the ability to control one’s environment and “goal-directed problem solving,” like cleaning out an overflowing closet. He supported the idea that you have to consider this kind of difficulty as “chronic” and said taking that perspective is most useful when trying to help someone with clutter issues.

  Executive function is a term you hear a lot at these conferences and in education circles as well. It refers to the battery of skills that are directed from the frontal lobe of the brain. These skills fall into two main groups: the ability to organize and the ability to regulate your behavior, emotions, visual imagery, and self-guidance.

  Barkley’s thesis is backed up by practitioners in the field. Dr. Ari Tuckman is a psychologist and author whose focus is patients with ADD and ADHD. He sees a definite overlap with chronic disorganization and his area of expertise. “What I find with a lot of folks with ADHD [is] what I call pseudo hoarding, which is when . . . they wind up keeping too much. Not because they really want all that stuff, but more because there’s a fear of getting rid of things—[a fear of] if I get rid of it, what if I need it? Which, you know, for a lot of folks with ADHD, has a little bit extra basis in reality.” For his patients, the fear that they waited too long to return something or forgot to send back an item can lead them to keep things around. He also says the process of going through extra stuff is really onerous and overwhelming for someone with ADD or ADHD. “For a lot of folks with ADHD, if the elves came in the middle of the night and cleaned everything up for them, they would be thrilled, whereas the folks who are more on the OCD/hoarding end of things, they would be mortified that: Oh, my God—all those precious gems were taken away from me.”

  Dr. Barbara Jo Dennison, PhD in psychology, pointed to post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, as a contributing factor to chronic disorganization. PTSD happens when a person is exposed to a traumatic event, experienced, witnessed, or learned that the event resulted in the death/serious injury to self, family, or friend and had repeated extreme exposure to the details of the traumatic event.

  She looked at what happens to the brain after a traumatic event and the problems that result—serious deficits in memory, focus, sorting, and decision-making. Everyone in the field, from junk removal guys to closet organizers, will tell you anecdotally that a traumatic event—a death, end of a marriage, loss of a job—can trigger problems with discarding things.

  Two of the leading experts in the long-term scientific study of hoarding are Dr. Randy Frost and Dr. Gail Steketee. They cowrote the book that nearly every other book and reference paper about over-accumulation repeatedly refers to: STUFF: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things. It should be noted that in their book they write of professional organizers that “their services are often helpful to people who hoard but insufficient for those with serious problems” and that chronic disorganization is “a euphemism for hoarding.”

  From a purely scientific point of view this may be accurate, but it is reminiscent of certain scientific benchmarks that don’t always apply to real-life scenarios. Strictly speaking, people over a certain body mass index are considered obese. Men’s Health magazine crunched the numbers and discovered that technically Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, the former professional wrestler and action movie hero who is a sex symbol and a giant wall of muscle, is technically obese if you go strictly by BMI.8 A candidate to join the New York Fire Department passed all the strength and agility tests, completing an obstacle course in seven minutes and thirty seconds when the required time to pass is ten minutes and twenty seconds. He was told his BMI was too high join and he had to lose weight. So is he really too fat to be a fireman? Is someone who is chronically disorganized always considered a hoarder?

  Take for example Adam Brown.*

  Wearing a lovely sage green button-down shirt, pressed trousers, and round glasses, Adam Brown greets me at the door of his apartment with a big smile and a small bag of trash. “I didn’t clean up for you, but I just was headed to the garbage chute.” I thought it was a good sign that he was taking out the rubbish; that meant the place might be cluttered but clean. He hurries down the hall and upon his return immediately invites me into his apartment. I wasn’t really sure what I was walking into at 7:30 AM on a Friday the thirteenth.

  The hallway is dark and it is hard to see at first. I could make out on the horizon stacks and stacks of books on the floor, creating a kind of biblio-fence down the right side of the long hallway. The book barrier takes up about a third of the width of the hall but it is clearly passable. “Here’s the bedroom, and there’s the TV, which is almost always on.” This morning it’s MSNBC’s Morning Joe. The TV is directly across from his bed that on one side is covered with all kinds of papers, documents, bills, flyers. I’d heard about this from our mutual friend’s six-year-old daughter Olivia. I thought maybe she was exaggerating when she told me Adam had a “desk bed” and that he only sleeps on one small side. Well Olivia’s report was accurate. While it is a full-sized bed for two, only one person could ever put his head down and maybe squeeze his body onto the non-littered side. Two pillows are stacked at the head. The comforter is hidden somewhere so Adam uses a vintage sleeping bag that is a patchwork pattern of apples and lumberjack-plaid squares. “A dear, dear friend of mine—a well-known screenwriter, you’d know her—told me, made me get the URL . . . or what ever you call it of ‘deskbed.com’ or ‘my desk bed’ because, you know . . . .” I learn that you know comes to mean that someday he could start a website about his deskbed. Or maybe patent it. Or maybe it would be a name of a book. It could be one of the many projects Adam might take on one day. He points to boxes that have papers he needs to go through. His floor fan doubles as a hamper with a few shirts tossed on it, yet hung on the door are freshly pressed clothes. On his bookshelf are piles of nicely folded shirts along with three lovely leather belts sitting in tissue paper. He picks up some shirt boxes off the deskbed. They are from a high-end fashion house, and he confesses, “I mean, I have boxes of these. I don’t even know how to say the name and they are covered in dust. I guess I was going to return them and ran out time.” They are from Façonnable, where shirts can go for a couple hundred dollars. Adam works long days and has been in his new job at an investment house for a bit over a year. “I’m aware that my outside appearance, the Zegna suits and all, doesn’t match what’s going on in here.”

  Adam is charming. Interesting. Interested. He is a fifty-something Ivy League graduate who has worked at major financial institutio
ns. He cares deeply about his family and his friends and their families. All around the apartment, tucked in nooks and crannies, are photos of his people. He is not married, but came close about a decade ago. He said he tried keeping the apartment clean during the courtship. After they broke up, the clutter reappeared. The next life-changing event was the death of his brother eight years ago. Adam still chokes up when he talks about him. He made one more attempt to clean the place almost exactly a year after his brother’s death, when it is Jewish tradition to unveil a headstone. He wanted his family to be able to come into his place. That was the last time he made a real effort, and since then the papers, books, and odd items have dominated his space. As he walks me through the 750-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment he speaks at a rat-a-tat pace and is full of wit and funny asides. Adam alternates between being embarrassed about his apartment and accepting.

  He points to the stacks and stacks of books he owns. The piles are organized by single subject. He has a shelf full of books about the Iraq war and another full of some of the best narrative nonfiction works that have become movies—A Civil Action, A Beautiful Mind, Black Hawk Down. He wants to write a book about presidential politics in the 1960s. His home is in one way very hopeful because it is an apartment full of possibility. But for now he lives in the land of the unfinished projects. And everything is a project for him. He points to a heap of Christmas cards and explains they are unopened—now months past the holidays—because he needs to consider what each one means. To his mind a card might lead to a dinner invite, a job opportunity, a new friendship. He has to consider very carefully how to respond to each one and until he has time to do this, they sit there unopened. “This may sound weird but I am a perfectionist. And if I can’t get it done perfectly then I won’t do it or I’ll wait until I learn how to or figure out how to do it.” This would explain the sixty-five books about screenwriting. He wants to write a screenplay, but he needs to know how to do it properly.