013: refusing to save the candles
how the extreme ritual of preservation holds us back
Back in September, I finally found the courage to splurge on my first pair of Doc Martens. I got myself the Jadon platform boots despite being well-aware of the fact that the quality of the famous footwear has declined in recent years. After all, this choice was rooted in the desire to heal my inner teenager, a new (yet already overused) catchphrase to define this phase of personal growth. I have used it almost every day since its purchase as I read in a lot of articles and online forums about Docs—they could withstand frequent use as long as they would be properly taken care of.
It has been five months since, and a week ago I had to clean and condition the leather, choosing an easy tutorial on Youtube after spending a good time binge watching cleaning videos to make sure I’d be doing it the way everyone else does. As I wiped the dirt off my shoes, I noticed the front of my left shoe already creasing, which I didn’t mind until I looked closer: the leather was slowly starting to crack. Since I have been trained to always think of the worst, I quickly Googled what that meant, hoping that it wasn’t beyond repair. I discovered that while you cannot get rid of the cracks once they begin to show, you need to condition the leather better if you’d like to keep using them for much longer. I didn’t like knowing that there was nothing I could do to remove the cracks, which was silly, because you wouldn’t notice it unless you were literally inches away from the damage. I hear the ghost of Augustus Waters whisper to me that it’s some kind of metaphor.
Looking at what could possibly go wrong (and being very exact about it) is trait that I obviously inherited from my mother. Each time I think I am satisfied with the narrative I have of her in my head, there is a lot more to learn about the woman who has loved me for more than half of her whole life and the entirety of my own. Her neuroticism lingers in me, constantly searching for what can go south and how. On days she is not satisfied, it must also be answered why things would turn out that way. In my mother’s vocabulary, things that can go wrong are also things that you can lose. She has developed a survival reflex because of this: safeguarding what belongs to her.
This is more commonly known as hoarding.
My sister and I never had our own bedrooms growing up. We had to share one space together, and the room that was supposed to belong to one of us was used for storage. I spent some of my childhood begging my mother to turn the bodega into my room, just like how white, middle class kids in the movies had their own sanctuary, an avenue for self-expression, an extension of oneself. These pleas were unheard, as my mother deemed her pile of things much more important. I always considered the bodega a claustrophobic dumpster: to the left of the room, it had a row of three drawers to store our clothes, which had bags and boxes on top of them that reached the ceiling, each container covered in years’ worth of dust; to the right was a built-in cabinet for a bunch of other things that probably last saw the light of day before I was born. Out of everyone in the house, it was my mother who knew what that room contained, and I only ever got a glimpse of them through her stories and the occasional rhetorical question that is ‘Now where did I put that?’, leading her to a calculated scavenger hunt. Some boxes were gifts from her wedding, some were Barbie dolls she did not want us to play with because they were collector’s items, some were hand-me-down clothes she wanted us to have once we ‘lose all those baby fat’. All the other stuff you couldn’t see from the door, she couldn’t explain why they were still taking up space because no reason was strong enough to get rid of them.
Like I said, hoarding.
My father and I used to reason with her about this tendency of hers, only to have my mother give us the cold shoulder. She would lament about not being understood, that she was doing this so we could have things to use when life gets better. That she was waiting for the right time to put everything out for us to enjoy. She often dreamed about us having a better house to live in, and she knew that that was where she could arrange her wide inventory of household items the way she wanted to. Not that life was terrible then, but things definitely could have been better. All these items were for safekeeping until things start to look up, she would tell us. Since everyone knew that there was nothing we could do to change her mind, we believed her and shared the same hope.
As my sister and I grew up, the promises of enjoying whatever objects my mother kept there for when life would get better slowly withered away. We ended up selling a lot of these things when we were struggling financially. You’d expect by this time that this room has been turned into something else, but it still is the bodega that I have always known it to be. The room has been able to breathe in the last few years; the mountains of trash reminiscent of Payatas have been rid of and some of the drawers gave out because of how old they were. The passing of time forced my mother to take a good look at her collection of treasure and admit to herself that a lot of these hopes and dreams attached to the most random of items had turned into unused garbage.
Recently I read a Facebook post1 theorizing that hoarding seems to be an Asian parent trait, more specifically a trait of boomers and Gen X parents who grew up in financially unstable households. Because of whatever sociopolitical/economic decline they experienced at the time, our older family members learned to appreciate this kind of sentimentality. The way they were raised taught them that anything can be taken away at any given moment, so it would be best to keep one’s hands full and overflowing. Better to have too much than too little. Better to have this now instead of the future where we are more likely to use it. Better to keep this in our inventory than to purchase this later down the road.
In a study conducted by Subramaniam et al. (2019), they named six reasons why people hoard items:
Their relationship to the item. The associations/memories participants have made with the items they refuse to get rid of are what strengthen the attachment. Some see it as a kind of collection that they can pass on to their kin.
Their plan to deal with an uncertain future. Perhaps the most logical reason, keeping loads of items that can be used eventually results in one feeling a bit more secure. They don’t want to run out of items that they could possibly use one day.
Their attempt to avoid wastage. Sayang, eh. To be fair, this is an environmentally friendly perspective. I am not talking about being this way in their own homes, though.
Their distress from the thought of getting rid of these items. Though this cannot be explained very well, some people who hoard just have very negative feelings that manifest when they try to entertain the idea of discarding these items they’ve collected.
Their family’s role in the dynamic. Some participants explained that they had family members who enabled their hoarding, or were simply not there to stop it.
Life events. Especially distressing ones, it is often what happens to us that lead to different coping strategies that soothe one’s feelings. However with hoarding, while the negative emotions are alleviated for the hoarder, this presents a new problem not only for the hoarder, but the people around them.
The study goes on to mention that hoarding has detrimental effects on the hoarder’s interpersonal relationships. Family members who are disrupted by the clutter either move out or ask the hoarder to move out. Some hoarders have enough self-awareness to realize that this is a problem and that this has to change, but for many others, this remains hidden in the depths of their subconscious.
There are many things about Beautiful Boy (2018) that stuck with me, but I think that this speech Timothée’s character delivers in rehab is something that I carry with me every day. Maybe I am crazy for still trying to empathize with my mother despite yapping on about her tendencies on the internet, but it seems to make sense: it is not my mother’s hoarding that is the problem—I mean, duh, it is a problem, but not the problem, you know—but it is how she’s been dealing with her problems. I had a conversation with her sometime ago about therapy. Even if I always told her about my sessions, I never really knew if she was open to the experience herself, so I asked, “Would you consider going to therapy?”
“Yeah, I guess,” she shrugged. “But I wouldn’t know what to talk about. There’s so much about my life that I don’t remember anymore.”
There is something painfully cruel about having all these wounds but not remembering how you got them, or why. I try to carry this conversation with me whenever I find myself reenacting another Lady Bird scene with her. It’s not that I am responsible for the way she nurses her own hurt, but I am responsible for how I react to this. It takes a lot of conscious effort to remember that I do not have to follow her footsteps and become a hoarder in every aspect of my life, and some days prove to be more difficult than others where I understand why my mother acts the way she does because I find myself doing the very thing I complain to her about.
I truly believe that the goal of getting better also includes ending up in a much better place than your parents did, and this means taking a good look at yourself and what traits they have passed down to you. In this day and age where it is so easy and empowering to say that you hate your parents, it becomes challenging to look at the good that they have given us. Obviously for those of us who lived in terribly abusive households, this is an impossible task that I won’t ask you to do, and I’m not here to impose. But because I’ve grown desperate in figuring out how I can break the cycle and emerge a much better individual, I am now more open to exploring the path of what good it has done being my parents’ child.
Hoarding is an extreme attempt to preserve, and a quick Google search will tell you that some antonyms of preservation include damage, destruction, and neglect. But life isn’t black and white—an all or nothing thinking is not only a form of cognitive distortion, but it keeps us from acknowledging the nuances we encounter as we try to let different truths coexist. To protect something from damage can mean to store it for a better occasion, but that is not always the case. Preservation does not always mean saving everything for a rainy day or for when we feel like we deserve it. I believe it matters just as much to know when preserving means maintaining the quality of life—that of our own through the items we use, items that can make life easier and maybe a bit more fun to experience.
Since I moved out, I have become more aware of how my mother’s safekeeping has saved my ass from rushing to the convenience store for trash bags because I store plastic bags in the cupboard and reuse them for disposal. I also have a small collection of Tupperware in my unit that I mindfully keep small so that my space won’t be too cluttered. At the same time, however, I am learning and establishing the boundaries of keeping items. I have begun to use items I purchase to fully enjoy the present and to make life convenient now instead of keeping them for tomorrow and associating these nice things I bought with the future I’m not 100% promised. I get rid of items I cannot repair or restore, and I allow myself to spend on items that need fixing and upgrading, simply because I deserve to live a life that is convenient for myself. I wear my Docs almost every time I go out and have found a better appreciation of cleaning them so that they keep up with my lifestyle. While I can only do so much to preserve items that I want to last forever, I remind myself that my job right now is to make as many good memories as I can with all these things that can make my life better, so that future me will have a fun time rummaging through these moments I’ll have hoarded by then.
I couldn’t find the post, but I found a Redddit post from 9 years ago that echoes the same sentiments.