Stuff by Gail Steketee Read Free Book Online Page A

things into them for solace." We've had a number of other hoarding clients who believed that their weight problems were related to their hoarding, and in one study we found that people with hoarding problems had higher than average body mass indexes.
    When Irene was nine years old, her grandparents moved in with the family. They were elderly immigrants from Europe, and their grooming habits were at odds with Irene's. They seldom bathed or used deodorant, and they seemed to Irene to leave an odor wherever they went. She would not sit in a chair that one of her grandparents had recently used; it disgusted her. Before long, she stopped sitting in any chair her grandparents had once occupied. Still, there was no cleaning compulsion, just a sense of disgust. In all likelihood, this was a precursor of her contamination fears.
    Objects seemed to have a special significance for Irene as a child. Although she was not deprived, she had relatively few toys and cherished the ones she had. She recalled never taking a number of them out of the package, perhaps foreshadowing her tendency to value mere possession over use of an object. She remembered one treasure, a cylindrical paisley pocketbook with a mirror on top, that her parents threw away when she was about ten. By this time, they had become annoyed with the number of things she was saving and occasionally took matters into their own hands. Perhaps this shaped her response, years later, to a friend who agreed to help her clean up but was dismissed for throwing away a gum wrapper. Irene developed elaborate strategies to foil those who insisted that she get rid of her stuff. When her husband threw out her piles of newspapers, she sneaked them back into the house by using them to line the bottoms of boxes she brought in to help her organize.
    Even losses that were not emotional were troubling, particularly the loss of a potential opportunity. I got a sense of this one day as we excavated in Irene's TV room. She came across a piece of paper with a telephone number written on it. Judging from its depth in the pile and the fact that it was yellowing, it had been there for quite some time, possibly years. Clearly, she had written it in haste on whatever she could find. As was the case for most of the information in the pile from which it came, she had not taken the time to identify it or put it in a phone or address book—it was just a number on a piece of paper. When she picked it up, she exclaimed, "Oh, a phone number! I'll put it here on the pile where I can see it and deal with it later."
    "Why do you think it is worth keeping that number?" I asked. She said, "Well, I made an effort to write it down, so clearly it was important to me. And it will just take a minute to call and find out what it is. I don't want to do it now, though, because it will interrupt us." She hadn't made the call in all the years the paper had sat in the pile. Whether making the call would have helped her make a decision about keeping the number is uncertain. Perhaps the idea of a potential opportunity that the number provided was better than the reality provided by making the call.
    In high school, Irene's behavioral oddities became more rigid and extreme. She felt compelled to do things in a certain way, particularly her schoolwork. Irene was an exceptional student, but at some cost. She insisted on using a #3 pencil sharpened to a very fine point so that she could write precisely. She printed everything in very tiny letters, and the formation of the letters had to be perfect. If she did not form a letter just right, she would start over and rewrite the entire page.
    In college, her room was not cluttered, though she remembers having lots of stuff packed in boxes. But other peculiarities caused her considerable discomfort. She recalled feeling tormented when other students came into her room and sat on her bed. It reminded her of her grandparents sitting on chairs and leaving an odor. Still, this torment was