Whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable...

I am a much more courageous person online than I am offline.

When I started posting on my Instagram this week all of the things I'm throwing away and how my apartment currently looks, I did it to empower myself.  I am tired of hiding.  Part of hoarding is hiding, and I feel like taking photos of it is like opening my door and letting people into my home to judge me.  It forces me to keep going each day, even when I'm afraid of what people might say.

Last night I showed my therapist the first video from day one, where I dramatically face the camera and admit I'm a hoarder.  I cringed!  "This is so embarrassing!"  And it was!  My face in the camera, the mess, watching myself admit that it was mine, watching my therapist react in shock at all the mess.

However then I showed her what my apartment looked like a few days before, all clean and vacuumed and that felt a little bit better.

See? Not so messy!

The truth is even though I'm a hoarder, the hoarding isn't actually that bad.  I have five boxes to go through and purge and donate, and then I'm done.

It's the messy habits I have of not throwing things that are clearly trash away that bother me. I can understand why I'd hoard broken Christmas decorations (I'll fix them!) or old books (those books helped me grow as a person!) or clothes (they'll fit again one day!).  What I can't understand is why I'm not throwing things out as I need to, just getting a trash bag and putting stuff away immediately, or creating better storage spaces for things I want to keep.

This is the disorder, no longer realizing what is valuable.

I am valuable.  I deserve a clear space and the one or two things out of the collection of things I want to keep deserve that clear space too.

My life and friends and family are valuable, much more valuable than all these half empty bottles of soap I'll never use, empty shoe boxes I'll never paint to be Pinteresting, and expired medications I'll probably never dispose of properly.

I don't want to end up being suffocated by things.