Sorry, I didn’t explain myself very well. I’m not saying it can’t be a mental illness. “The stuff isn’t the sickness” is regarding my stuff.
This was part of a larger rant about how abusive those reality shows about “hoarders” are. I rant about them often enough I figure people get bored of hearing about it. I forgot I needed to give enough context or it could look like I was trying to discount the experiences and existence of people with OCD.
Post-script: My stuff is close enough to under control that no one is going to try to make TV out of it but these days if someone tried a stunt like that on me they’d get a trespassing charge and a one way ticket out of my life. Learning to stand up for myself has been a big part of my self-improvement over the last few years.
We joke about it but sometimes it is significantly easier and cheaper to go out and buy another of a thing than to find the one we have ‘somewhere around here’. Of course, that contributes to the things that we have around here, hiding each other…
TBH it’s always been easy for me to not get into cigs, weed, and booze because the first two stink to me and the last one has very few mixes I’ve found tasty, so I dig yah.
Coffee was sort of the same for me for the longest time but I have a coffee nut pal and he got me hooked on the good stuff. I’m no coffee snob but I can tell a good cup from a “well, it’s caffeine”
There’s a program called “Dress for Success” that helps low-income women enter the workforce or re-enter the workforce after prison or having to restart their lives. Some centers take unopened make-up, and run workshops on applying make up for office jobs. I don’t have a lot of make up, but when I buy one of those Bare Minerals kits, there’s always something in there that is bizarrely out-of-place for the skin tone kit I buy, so I drop it by when I do my cabinet clean-out.
During a recent move, I went on a hunt for specialty organizations for some of our things that felt out of place at a Goodwill. Refugee resettlement organizations are really happy to have unopened household samples - I had seven million nursing pads samples left - because US products might have a different set of ingredients and allergens than products from home. I got a lot of mailers recently from my move, so I’ll probably find the local resettlement org in the big city and drop them by on my way out of town for the holidays. I prefer my house as empty as possible.
I have today off (banks get Remembrance Day off, which was Saturday, so), and spent the morning cleaning the apartment.
The good news is that the “jetsam” – stuff I don’t have room to store properly – is diminishing. Tidying takes a lot less time than it used to, and I cleaned all the main areas (everything but the bedroom).
What you saw was just the most recent ones.