When It's Time To Declutter: My Story

Photo by spykster on Flickr

Yesterday, me and my husband went through our collection of comic books and chose over 700 to give away/recycle. If 700 sounds like a large number, you can only imagine how many comics we started with!

We are both in the comic book industry, and in addition to getting comp books through our work and through friends, we spent a significant amount of money on the publications each week as new ones arrived at the store. I was by far the more avid collector than my husband.

Comic books can be a hoarding nightmare. They are thin but quite plentiful, and they really add up in bulk. Because there is so many of them -- and new ones every week! -- trying to keep track of, and organize, them becomes a constant chore. At some point, you start to give up, shunting your new finds to the side on top of an ever-larger pile that you never really read, much less file away into some meaningful order.

Needs to be repeated: comic books can be a hoarding nightmare. I've seen people frightfully overtaken and overwhelmed in their apartments by their out-of-control comic book collections. The sheer bulk and chaos reaches a certain tipping point, and it becomes almost impossible to organize and cull the collection without outside help.

We have never got to that point, but it is only because we seem to have a certain interior clock that says, every six months or a year: GET RID OF STUFF OR ELSE! We know what will happen if we don't do it. We know what will happen if we get even a little bit weak and cull too little or let the boxes of "to be recycled" comics sit around the house too temptingly long (comics rescue! yay! everything back to normal!).

It took a year to get to the point of this massive culling. Why did I do it? I just realized that the energy surrounding these books -- many I did not get around to reading -- was weighing me down severely. Even the act of the culling and organization was an exhausting task, leaving me each time I attacked it feeling completely zonked. I realized that the reason that I did not get around to reading many of them was because I outgrew them -- they were no longer relevant to who I was now. By being far more selective about what I kept, I also better defined what my tastes are now. I was better able to think clearly and decide what I needed to leave behind.

I know I also overbuy certain things -- especially things that I do not have a deep attachment for -- because it is a way of dealing with stress. It was comforting to go to the comic store each week and buy these books and see all the familiar faces of my youth look back at me from the pages. The act of buying made me feel like I had a real sense of control in my life, a proactive attitude, a sense of power: "I am now making these important purchases with money I have earned; I'm accomplishing something."

As frustrating and self-defeating such a life-tactic can be, the fact that I realized exactly what I was doing was the thing that undid the "spell." Hoarding is a condition that exists best in the cover of darkness and ignorance. While understanding the process behind the act will not automatically solve all one's problems, it will at least shine a spotlight and make you uncomfortable enough to take the next step.

There were also issues regarding comics in particular that led to yesterday's culling. More and more comic books are available on the iPad digitally, and it is just so much easier and more convenient to store them on a thumb drive or a cloud than in their "hard copy" form (a standard "long box" of comics holds 300 and weighs 20 pounds). While I still have an interest in reading comic books, the types that I had been collecting had become less and less appealing to me. I also desired to read more straight-up books, and books on topics that had nothing to do with comics or pop-culture. I was growing as a person...but unfortunately so was my collection.

If your collection grows faster than you evolve as a human being, you need to stop and take a good look at things. Quitting cold-turkey by throwing everything out is not the answer -- it is only trading one extreme for another, and the pendulum will swing equally both ways. In future posts, I will outline the methods that have worked for me, seeing me through several phases of huge collections & successfully keeping them under control before they got to Hoarding Defcon 5.