I returned to my apartment in the middle of the day on a Friday. Upon strolling down the block I was greeted with a foul stench in the air – a mix of rotting newspapers and dust and orange rinds that seemed to be coming from the oversized dumpster parked in the street right in front of my stoop. Not terribly strange for Manhattan, but I live in a relatively clean neighborhood; the garbage cans are always covered outside my building, we recycle plastic and paper, etc, so this huge open dumpster was a shock to my senses. Not wanting the smell to get inside my apartment, I zoomed up the stoop, into the hallway, and opened and shut my door to my apartment quickly, but not before dodging workmen emerging from down the hallway in white zip-up, sterilized (well, not anymore) bodysuits hauling gray plastic garbage cans full of the trash stew to be thrown into the cauldron outside.

Once inside my clean, non-smelly apartment, I took some precautions: removed my flip flops at the door, sprayed some Febreze in the air, and Swiffered the living room floor to within an inch of its life. I would be lying if I didn’t say that my recent foray into the wonderful experience that was bed bugs has made me slightly germophobic; I now have a pair of pink plastic leopard-print flip flips that I’ve designated as my “house slippers,” I Swiffer the floor every 3 days or so, and no street clothes will be worn on my bed, by me or by anyone else…er…wait…I think I should relax that one a little. That could get ugly…

I started to wonder what the garbage and the smell and the cleaning crew could be about. Maybe someone died? Maybe someone was moving and just had a ton of stuff to throw away first?

“Maybe she’s a hoarder,” my roommate said. “You know, like crazy-cat-lady-syndrome, but with garbage.” Psh. Ridiculous. I can understand why someone would want to collect cute little kittens and feed them and give them a home and pet them and (Good God! Am I going down this road one day?) But smelly, stinking, dirty garbage?

After a conversation with the jovial, well-intentioned super of my building, I learned that the woman who lives in the apartment down the hall is, in fact, a hoarder, and just began a support program, and hired this cleaning company to get rid of everything in her apartment. They filled up three huge dumpsters with garbage and it took a week to empty everything from her apartment – the place was literally packed, floor to ceiling, with garbage. I have to be honest, upon first hearing this some judgmental resentment kicked in – ugh, this sucks, now the building is going to smell bad, they’re going to do construction, it will be loud and messy, great. Thanks a lot, lady. At that point I definitely was not wondering if it would all be sorted and recycled – I just wanted it out of there.

But then I started doing some research on the matter and found out some information about hoarding from the OC Foundation website. Hoarding is a mental disorder generally categorized under OCD, and sometimes as an impulse control disorder:

“Hoarding is a problem that is asked about frequently in connection with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). We can define hoarding as acquiring and keeping objects to such an extent that they begin to impair the normal use of one’s living space. Most of the time, non-hoarders do not think the saved objects have little or any intrinsic value. However, it is also possible that a hoarder is a collector as well. There are other disorders sometimes associated with hoarding including obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD). However, in most cases, it is likely that the individual hoarder has a variation of OCD.”

Now, I am not a licensed therapist nor do I claim to have any in depth knowledge of this subject, but from what I’ve been reading, it appears that hoarding behavior is the result of other things, not just the desire to have more “stuff”: the inability to make a decision, difficulty sustaining the attention to organize their possessions, difficulty with anxiety, grief, and anger, perfectionism, the list goes on.

Hoarders’ spaces can look like this…………………or they can look like this.

I’m not sure what all this has to do with Buddhism and meditation, and would never suggest to a compulsive hoarder that they meditate to help them get over it. Psychotherapy and possibly medication is needed, but perhaps in the more long term, a meditation practice might be something that would help a compulsive hoarder to let go of some of the attachment they feel to their possessions, and as a way of exploring the feelings that come up for them. But again, I’m not sure what meditation alone could do for someone with a serious mental disorder such as this, and would definitely not recommend meditation as a course of action for dealing with a severe mental illness – I’d be afraid it would become part of the illness instead of a method of dealing with it. And I definitely would never compare compulsive hoarding to the whole American mindset of “give me more stuff.” It goes far beyond that and is no longer an issue of morality or value judgment, it is an illness.

This NY Times article from January 2008 gives some more information about compulsive hoarding:
“Compulsive hoarding is defined, in part, by clutter that so overtakes living, dining and sleeping spaces that it harms the person’s quality of life. A compulsive hoarder finds it impossible, even painful, to part with possessions. It’s not clear how many people suffer from compulsive hoarding, but estimates start at about 1.5 million Americans.
Dr. Tolin recently studied compulsive hoarders using brain-scan technology. While in the scanner, hoarders looked at various possessions and made decisions about whether to keep them or throw them away. The items were shredded in front of them, so they knew the decision was irreversible. When a hoarder was making decisions about throwing away items, the researchers saw increased activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, a part of the brain involved in decision-making and planning.”

I also came across the rating scale that is used to determine severity of hoarding. I think the questions are pretty interesting. Even if you’re not a hoarder, they make you think about your own attachment to possessions. As I read it I looked around my room and my kitchen, thinking about the small areas of clutter: Why am I saving those old notebooks from last semester? I’m never going to look at them again. Why do I have six Buddha figurines? Do I really need more than one? That shelf is filled with paints and art supplies that I haven’t used in a year but that I am totally going to break out one day. I know I’m not a hoarder – but I do wonder why I keep certain things. Maybe I’m a hoarder of memories, and a few of those memories take on physical forms. But I suppose it’s only considered suffering if it interferes drastically with your day-to-day life.

The real fruits of my internet search for information about compulsive hoarding turned into an extension of my meditation practice in cultivating compassion for someone I don’t even really know. I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like to live as a hoarder, but I can imagine the suffering and the courage that it takes to start the real, hard work on improving your life; sorting through things, throwing things away, decided what is worth keeping, how do you start over? And having to think about all the things that led up to the hoarding that could have been a trigger or a lingering cause. I think it really does take courage.

I would like to close this blog post by sending along some Metta (e-Metta?) to my neighbor across the way.

May she be healthy, may she have happiness.

And may whatever rats and roaches were living in there, get out of the building before the exterminators come tomorrow to deal with them in, I hope, the most nonviolent way possible.