I used to have a lot of different hobbies, and those hobbies came with a lot of stuff. I was an artist, so I had all the painting supplies. I was the go-to guy for my friends for all the DIY stuff because I enjoyed that kind of work and kept adding to my tool collection. I studied to be a designer, so I still sewed as a hobby. And at the time, I was also a makeup artist with an extensive kit. All very organized.

But in 2004, my mom passed away, and I started to develop an irrational need to keep adding to my collections. Eventually, it turned into a pile of soup and started pushing me out of my own home.

It was a clean mess, because one of the other things I was hoarding was cleaning supplies and organizational tools that were supposed to be the magic solution. But I was literally sleeping on blankets in a nest I made for myself in the hall.

The way I explain it to people is with a bottle cap. You lose your ability to think rationally about things. You take a bottle cap off, look at it, and 30 minutes later you still haven’t decided what to do with it. You have to get back to your day, so you put it in a bucket. Then months later, you have a bucket full of bottle caps.

Now your brain has to rationalize that. So the bucket becomes “potential.” You could turn them into an art project, donate them for a children’s craft, or use one to level a chair. Your brain doesn’t want to accept that the behaviour is irrational, so it builds reasons.

That’s where the reprogramming has to happen. It’s also why people don’t understand why hoarders can get so angry when someone touches their stuff. Months or even years their brain has created “rational” reasons for keeping those things so a broken plastic fork has as much emotional attachment as a photo of their first child.

By 2007, I had mostly worked through it with therapy. What helped was taking the thinking out of the object. I wrote lists of what I would do regardless of what the item was. So when something came into my life, I followed the list instead of debating it. Eventually, my brain went back to normal.

I did have some turmoil between 2007 and 2022, which made me afraid to go back to the hobbies I loved. I thought I might have to give them up for good. But in 2022, I picked up a paintbrush again and started painting.

Hoarding doesn’t have to be permanent, but once you’ve been through it, you do have to keep an eye on it and stay preventative. I probably could have started painting again sooner—that part was more fear than rational.