Are you a hoarder? Do you save your old e-mail, Christmas cards, letters, and every paper you wrote for school?

I do. I have five or six boxes of assorted junk in my basement. My e-mail habits pale beside my paper storage habits.

Even so, I've got nothing on my boyfriend, who even saves spam.

Are you a purger or a saver?

-- Anonymous, January 05, 2000

Answers

god, i save everything. i am so obsessed with the three years+ email i have in eudora that i back it up once a week so i won't lose more than 7 days worth of email. i even back up the trash can, for god's sake. plus i have letters and email printouts from god knows when in high school, and newspaper clippings and magazine articles from even before that. i am the hugest packrat and it drives my roommates crazy. because our room is always covered in a fine layer of my junk and things i think i need to save. except right now, because we cleaned the day we got back to campus, and that's only two days ago - i haven't had the chance to destroy it again with all my new junk.

-- Anonymous, January 05, 2000

I purge more than I save. I bought myself a shredder for the new year, because I hate having files and boxes of old bills and other papers that I don't feel comfortable putting into the recycling bin and don't have the time and/or energy to tear up into tiny pieces by hand before putting in the regular trash.

For me, there's nothing more therapeutic than burning or tearing up or deleting old journals, emails, etc. I only save old cards and letters that my daughter gives me, but of course those are little works of art.

Moving every few years also helps. Once we lived in the same apt. for 11 years, and that was horrible when we moved, to clean out the storage space under the building especially.

This year, I want to get rid of everything I don't use anymore or don't love enough to want to store properly or display nicely. I *hate* clutter, and when I go to people's houses that are super-cluttered, I usually find it stressful to be in their space.

-- Anonymous, January 05, 2000

Huh? I'm having a hard time reading this because of all the junk near the computer...

e-mail. I save it, too, but I often back it up onto my "old junk I'll never look at again" F drive. I still have C64 disks, though, of mail, that I have no idea how I'll ever liberate.

The worst e-hoarding I do, though, is from the family e-circle, where I go through and copy each comment or posting. It's time-consuming and hardly relevant (except for my son's description of his proposal, which I intend to print in a calligraphy script and affix in a wedding book for my great-grandchildren.)

-- Anonymous, January 05, 2000

Lifelong hoarder, slowly converting to purger. I just finally had it with all the damn paper that comes in the mailbox. I've started throwing away bill stubs instead of keeping them. I used to conscientiously keep everything and file it in a folder in the filing cabinet.

But I'm so behind on the filing that the pile of paper just keeps metastasizing. Only the most important stuff (like credit card stubs and the phone bill) are now being kept. Everything else is being ruthlessly shredded and tossed.

I still keep cards and letters though. I get so few of them that they're not in any real danger of overbalancing the paper pile.

As for email -- nope, that I don't hoard. I keep judiciously, but I use Pine for my mail and when the box gets too full I can't find anything so it encourages me to go on delete sprees.

-- Anonymous, January 05, 2000

I'm cleaning right now. There are so many things that I just *can't* get rid of. Little bits of junk, papers, art supplies. I ended up buying some plastic boxes to just shove the crap in. That way I still have it but I don't have to see it. I save all personal email, all email that was sent when I sub to a list, but never spam. I think you need to get Jeremy some help there...

I was devastated when I lost my email on diet* a few months ago. There were still three month old emails that I never got to respond to! I also have four or five hotmail accounts that have email in them from 1996.

It's a sickness I tell

-- Anonymous, January 05, 2000

I save just about everything. Especially email. I've been trying to figure out how I can empty out my folders and store them somewhere but I don't know. But yeah, I'm a big ol' packrat.

-- Anonymous, January 05, 2000

I save everything. I've been trying to purge some stuff, mostly paper, but I'm not succeeding.

I have a box of letters from the first guy I was in love with, at age 15, that I just can't throw out. I've put them into a garabage bag no less than three times, and every time I retrieve them and put them away safe. I mean, some day I'm going to have kids and then some day much later I'm going to die and they are going to find these letters. Will it be like the Bridges of Madison County?

I have two four-drawer file cabinets full of papers and bills and stuff. I was in there cleaning stuff out, or attempting to, and I found Discover card bills from the early 90's. I'm pretty sure I don't need them. And then I must have 4 or 5 plastic baskets on my desk full of mail and catalogs and other assorted junk I need to file or trash.

But I also invested in a shredder and I'm doing my best to organize and purge what I don't need. I have to do the same with my clothing.

I'm thinking of buying another file cabinet. If I'm going to be a packrat, I might as well be neat about it.

-- Anonymous, January 05, 2000

I save. Even with the move this year, a golden opportunity to purge, I packed more than I threw away. It's mostly paper that I keep. Cards, letters, and the like. I still have a number of papers I wrote in high school, which was some 20 years ago. Like they are going to come in handy sometime.

I'm less of a saver electronically, since I don't have that much space on my hard drive.

-- Anonymous, January 05, 2000

I save everything...from baby puppy teeth to pages ripped out of magazines with outfits or furniture or landscaping or barn ideas I liked 10+ years ago (that are no longer in style and are laughable at this point). The couple of times I've actually broken down and cleaned up the basement I've gone down to look for something the next week or so only to realise I pitched it in the clean up! No more!! I've often thought it would be liberating for my house to burn down, but then I start thinking of all the things that I would have to be sure were safe first; dogs, cats, antiques, photo albums, notebooks, computer, sentimental things, etc., etc., and realise I had just better not move and perhaps they should cremate me here, house and all, cause I pity the person who tries to go through in all after any more time passes by.

-- Anonymous, January 05, 2000

My recent move has made me into a purger. I'm pretty sure I'm going to be in this place for years, so I'm refusing to let it get cluttered. The first stop when the mail arrives is the trash can. The hot pink fleece sweatshirt is outta there. And if it "might be useful someday," I'll buy another one when I have a use.

-- Anonymous, January 05, 2000

Do you really need to ask? I save far too much. see this entry if you don't believe me.

I'm trying to get rid of as much as I can- there's a lot I just don't need, that has no meaning or future use for me. Especially in the paper stuff. But it takes far too long to go through and figure out what is important. And then I have to deal with the things I have deliberately collected, which just makes it a bit more overwhelming. Argh.

-- Anonymous, January 05, 2000

i have great aspirations when it comes to saving things. i think i'm a scrap book keeper. really what i do is buy a beautiful scrap book every year or so, put it in a drawer and pile things on top of it.
i save everything. and then i go through and throw lots of things out. i still end up with more saved than tossed, but i alternate between the two. when i clean i go psycho and spend weeks entrenched in Stuff.
bleh!

-- Anonymous, January 05, 2000

I save everything. We moved and I tried to get rid of stuff, without much success. It didn't cure me, either.

-- Anonymous, January 05, 2000

I'm a saver. I need someone tidy to come and be brutal with my stuff. I love the computer because you can pile up letters and emails in scruffy unsorted heaps and no-one can tell. Outside of the hard drive though it's a different story -- piles of (mainly) paper on every surface, boxes of it under the bed, folders full behind the sofa. Sometimes I have a manic clear-out, but inevitably discover I've thrown out something irreplaceable in the process. Maybe it's a genetic thing; my father was a top-class hoarder. After he died my mother & brother went to his office to clean out his locker. A colleague backed out of the room after finding them crouched down, shoulders shaking, hands over faces. But they weren't crying, they were laughing. They'd just found where Dad had kept all the stuff Mum had made him get rid of over the years. Tiny shoes, balls of string, jars of rusted screws, it was all there.

-- Anonymous, January 05, 2000

I keep some things, but I'm not obsessive about it.

the trash piles up, but I'm not emotionally attached to it. it's just inconvenient to go down a long hall, through the door, up a flight of stairs, through a gate, across the alley, into a locked garage, all to take out the trash or recyclables. That's one reason I don't subscribe to the newspaper -- I get my news from NPR.

Living by myself is a factor -- when I've shared living space, I had to be neater because the other folks' mess annoyed me. I can't complain about them if I don't deal with my own stuff.

Something that has helped me is reading the alt.recovery.clutter newsgroup, and the allied DECLUTTR mailing list. I get strategies and ideas for making progress against all this *stuff*, and I read about people who have it worse than me.

Losing your mail must have been very traumatic!

Anita of Anita's BOD and Anita's LOL

-- Anonymous, January 05, 2000

I used to be a hoarder - with the amazing ability to hoarde junk that other's didn't want anymore. That lasted until I got married when, by law, I now owned 50% of all my husband's junk. (

A year and a half ago, we moved from a small duplex to a much larger place outside of town. Knowing we had extra space, I wanted to finally retrieve all my furniture, which was being stored in his parent's garage. When we pulled up in the moving truck, my husband's mother was gleefully pulling boxes out of every storage space int heir house and lining them up to be loaded on the moving truck along with my furniture. A year later, those boxes still sat untouched in his closet. We finally went through them and found boxes of junk: 7- year-old check book registers, newspapers, and things which we were afraid to identify.

Now, we live a simpler life. This is a junk-free zone. Sorta. I did managed to stash a box of all my old Barbies in the linen closet.

-- Anonymous, January 06, 2000

my parents are both insane hoarders, although my mom is much worse than my dad. i grew up in a house crammed full of boxes of old magazines and catalogs, clothes that hadn't fit anyone in years, ancient unsorted junk mail, hundreds of video tapes (VHS and beta), and god knows what else. i wouldn't even let my friends come over because i was so embarrassed of our house.

so now that i'm basically on my own, i try very hard to avoid all hoarding. unfortunately, since i'm still in school, my achilles heel is old coursework/textbooks. i wish i had a TARDIS that i could stuff all that bulky, annoying crap into until i need it.

-- Anonymous, January 07, 2000

I'm an anti-hoarder by nature. All during my single life I threw out or gave away whatever I didn't need: old bank records, worn clothes, trashy novels, extra kitchen equipment, whatever. The only objects not subject to disposal were good books. I always enjoyed watching the bookshelf grow. My NYC studio felt spacious, even though it was fully furnished.

Now I'm married and I have a house filled with piles and piles of junk. There's less empty space in six rooms and a basement than I had in 400 sq. ft. as a bachelor. There are stacks of empty boxes in the basement just in case we need to mail something the size of those boxes. There are three closets full of old clothes that no one is ever going to wear - we're just cheating the kids who go to the Salvation Army for Halloween. (And, why on earth did I buy an ankle length suede duster?) The extra stuff gives me the same discomfort that my extra weight does. I feel tight in my house and I keep thinking, "I have got to lose some of this." My wife, of course, thinks the problem is that we have too many old books lying around the place.

-- Anonymous, January 07, 2000

I'm a definite saver. I have 8 large drawers full of cards and notes and things ripped out of magazines and posters and basically everything. I go through it and sort all the trash occasionally. All I can bear to throw away is the things related to interests I no longer have, everything else must stay! That process never reduces it by more than 1/5. I will have to resort to cartons soon.

I also have a special drawer for all the really meaningful stuff. In the event of a fire, that is what I would grab, even before my computer or books - it would come second only to people and pets. I have my first Valentine, and the tag from the present that came with it, my first ball ticket, all my letters and cards from boyfriends and all that stuff in there. I am horribly nostalgic. Some of it makes me cry to read again but I can't part with it.

When it comes to my computer, I save all my email, and back up my Eudora folders on a fortnightly basis. I save my ICQ histories every fortnight as well, and keep chat logs. It is madness.

I save stuff. So does my father, and his grandfather before him, to the point of eccentricity. It's in my blood.

-- Anonymous, January 12, 2000

I think the offical term for me is "pack rat extrodinaire".

The year i finished college, my stuff had to go in storage. So I went through every box, and threw out anything useless. Gee, do you think that 2nd grade french notebook is going to come in handy anytime soon? What about my 6th grade science notebook with the drawings of celery cells? And who is Katherine at 225 5714?? Do I know a Katherine? Did I *ever* know a Katherine? It's on a teeny piece of coloured paper with a rainbow drawn on it - now, did I save it because of the phone number, or the rainbow doodle?

And what about the broken stereo? Do you think I need that?

And how about all those little branch arrangements in glass jars? Do I really need the first rose I ever received from a boy, all crumbly and covered in dust? Isn't the memory enough?

Needless to say, about 5 or 6 boxes of stuff got tossed.

And I *still* have too much! I hoard magazines - and some would say not even useful ones. Piles of Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and an occasional Wallpaper* thrown in. The guy who helped me to move my stuff nearly put out his back picking up a couple of boxes full of those damn things.

Oh and I forgot all the clothes I'm never going to wear again. Piles of them. Like three suitcases. Actually make that two hockey/duffle bags and two suitcases. I really really need to stop doing this to myself.

I'm currently living in a room - and it started off alright. Well, now it's packed with a huge IVAR corner wall unit, a desk with attached shelving that I hate, a queen size bed, courtesy of mom, and a really cool old sewing machine. And that doesn't include what is *on* the furniture :)

Oh god. I need to clean.

-- Anonymous, January 14, 2000