Giving a Voice to the Silence: We are all Hoarders

Chaos is my word for today. Chaos can send you into a world of confusion and depression, lethargy and just plain nothingness. Chaos can create extreme anxiety because there seem to be no way out. Chaos around us will throw you into chaos and paralyze you with fear. Sounds horrible, doesn’t it? Sorry to be so negative, but the more we let things build up around us, the harder it is to find our way out, to find a way to be at peace and feel free from our prison of stuff.

I have watched the T.V. show Hoarders and wonder how people can live like that, most who watch the show will readily criticize and say they just need to get off their butts and clean, let go of the junk. While this is true, it’s not that easy for any of us to do. To an extent, we are all hoarders. We all have things we do not want to let go of, items that collect in drawers, in corners and even in our minds, we cannot imagine parting with. Face it, we all have the notorious junk drawer. That one place where we keep items that we know we will need one day, for some reason.

What we see on T.V. is obviously the extreme and the majority of us will never get to that point, but the tendency is there for anyone to become trapped within their own chaos, whether it is physical items that others can see or mental that we hide from everyone. Mental hoarding, while probably not an official term, to me is just as debilitating as hoarding objects and becoming buried by them. I believe we can also become buried by our thoughts. Those thoughts we keep burying in our minds can bury us just as easily as material objects. They cloud our judgement, blind us to reality and keep us from thinking clearly and rationally.

The label hoarder can come in many forms. What are you hoarding?