Why I Watch Hoarders

I’ll tell you something embarrassing: I watch the TLC show “Hoarders” to help me understand my own brain.

Please don’t send CPS to my house; I’m not an actual hoarder, and my kids are not living in squalor. I have too much pride for that. I don’t have a sentimental attachment to objects; in fact, my primary cleaning strategy is to buy a massive box of industrial sized trash bags, tackle a room in the house, and just throw it all away and let it all go. It certainly helps with the constant clutter with which I unwittingly surround myself. But it’s also a heck of a lot easier than trying to create some sort of organizing system..

Chronic disorganization. That’s the name of my shameful secret, and it’s plagued me since birth. My mom says I used to surround myself with random junk in my crib. In second grade, my teacher assigned a classmate to help me organize my backpack. Most drawers in my house are, by default “junk drawers” if I’m not super intentional and meticulous, and my poor husband has basically just decided to roll with my non-existent storage system for my surplus assortment of pots and pans. The lids may be stored in a completely different drawer than their corresponding Tupperware containers, and for the time being, we’re just making it work.

If I’m really honest; my lack of organizational skills has always been a source of deep shame for me. I think it’s the closest I’ve ever come to understanding what it might be like to experience dyslexia or some other sort of intellectual delay. People observe the behavior and think, “Just work harder.” The judgments that accompany the problem are INTENSE. “Lazy” is the word people most often associate with those of us who struggle to keep our spaces tidy. Except a lot of us aren’t lazy at all. We’re perfectionist procrastinators who hesitate to even start projects unless and until we are confident that we can do them perfectly, and the constant state of overwhelm is, well, overwhelming.

For a lot of years, my life was just a matter of surviving the current crisis; there was no time or safety to really evaluate this kind of thing. I was just trying to keep my babies fed and my head above water. But my therapist warned me when I got married that, the safer and more stable my life became, the more I would find myself wrestling with all my long-suppressed demons, and this one? It’s a doozy.

Have you ever visited an escape room? Where you have to solve a mystery by collecting and interpreting a series of clues distributed cryptically throughout the room before time runs out? A numeric code here, a line of text there. Half the time, you have no idea if you’re doing anything right or interpreting the clues correctly. That’s what it’s like inside my brain when I try to psychoanalyze the root of my disorganization.

But one clue I’m relatively certain I’m interpreting correctly is that my problems with organization are a symptom of the greater problem of disembodiment. I know it may sound like some psychobabble buzzword, but trust me, it’s a real problem. The best way I know to describe it is that I often feel like my brain is in the garden while the rest of my body is in the kitchen. My husband cannot, for the life of him, understand why my keys seem to end up in random places like the refrigerator instead of the key hook where is car keys routinely reside. I’ve tried to explain to him that, in order for me to hang the keys where they belong, I have to be aware that I’m doing anything with my keys at all, and half the time, I’m just not. I’m somewhere else entirely.

My boss once painted a stark white wall bright red. I did not notice. Another time, I got lost just trying to exit my sister’s two-bedroom apartment. My spatial awareness is almost non-existent, to the degree that I almost feel like I’m trying to master the alphabet while everyone around me is tackling Homer in the original Greek, and I’m constantly working to hide the discrepancy.

I can’t tell you exactly why this is so severe for me. I do suspect it’s probably trauma-related, but again, all I can do is guess? (TRIGGER WARNING: Graphic overshare to follow): My earliest recollection of feeling like I existed outside my body was when I was quite young. It involves my abuser isolating me in a guest bedroom of the home we were housesitting together. He was in my bed, my underwear was off, and his head was under the covers. I remember feeling like I was floating in the top right corner of the bedroom, looking down on the situation, completely divorced from the reality of it, as though I was not an active participant in it. And that’s all I’ve got. A devastating clue, cracked out like an isolated missing piece of a 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle with no edge pieces.

I guess it makes sense to me that when your body is weaponized against you, you might start to subconsciously view it as the enemy, seeking ways to escape it. I think this is why I have so much more empathy for the scores of young girls getting sucked into the gender cult than I do for the grown men living out their fetishes. To me, it’s pretty stinking clear that so many of these girls are just trying to shed the parts of themselves that were used to wound them. They don’t want to inhabit their vulnerability. They want to hover above it in the corner of a room somewhere and pretend it’s happening to someone else. Their disembodiment, like mine, is often trauma-based. I actually understand this part pretty clearly; the challenge, though, is figuring out what to do about it.

I have to admit that, given the recent discourse about false rape allegations and the number of men on my newsfeed swearing that false accusations are worse than actual rape, I bristle a little inside. Don’t get me wrong; I think false accusations are horrible and should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But I’m 40 years old still walking around with an unquantifiable amount of brain damage because of a predator’s horrible decisions, and in some ways, it really does feel like a life sentence- the gift that keeps on giving and rearing its ugly head in areas of my life where I never intended to give it a moment’s access.

And the more I evaluate it, the more I recognize its unfortunate intersection with a particular strand of Christian doctrine that also inadvertently contributes to a disembodied reality. While my trauma caused me to dissociate my body from my thoughts, my theology invited me to dissociate my heart as well. I grew up believing emotions were essentially the enemy and that they needed to be subdued and mastered at pretty much any cost. “The heart is deceitful above all else,” I learned. And there’s truth there; we can’t afford to let our feelings run roughshod over truth. But when you’re an already traumatized, disembodied passionate girl who learns that emotions are dangerous, you’re left with something of a recipe for personal disaster and dysfunction, a lot of which played out on the grand stage of my life in my early 20s. You learn to hate the parts of yourself that are actually your strengths. You learn to wage war against them. You learn the art of self-sabotage. Everything becomes about escape.

I’ve come an awfully long way in my healing journey, and the Lord has been faithful to restore so much to me in terms of health and sanity and stability. But I’m not fully healed in the embodiment department, and I thought I should just name the struggle. If blogging and advocacy have taught me anything, it’s that we aren’t alone in our personal battles, especially the embarrassing ones we’d rather just hide. Someone out there reading this will know exactly what I’m talking about, and hopefully it will encourage him/her in her own journey.

I think God wants us to thrive in spirit, mind, and body, and I’m believing He’s interested in bringing our chaos back to order. Here’s to hoping that, a decade from now, I’ll look back on this post in awe and wonder at the breakthrough He’s brought me in this area.