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00:01:23.000This is the Culture Study Podcast, and I'm Anne Helen Peterson.
00:01:30.560And I'm Amanda Yuley. I'm author of the memoir, Destroy This House, which is about my
00:01:35.420very outlandish and sometimes wonderful parents. My mom was a hoarder,
00:01:40.420and my father was a schemer. And I wrote this book to memorialize them and celebrate them in a way.
00:01:48.080Tell us about deciding to write this book, because I feel like it's one of those books
00:01:52.900that like was there and you had to decide I'm going to touch it I'm going to do it it was there
00:01:59.400for a long time I mean it was there in my childhood I knew from a very early age that my
00:02:06.040parents were unusual and you know I would even say extraordinary in in lots of ways some very
00:02:13.240flawed ways but also you know they were extraordinarily kind of fun in some ways too
00:02:17.420So I always knew that. Whether I knew that I would write about them, I mean, I really didn't know that until about 2007. I was in my, I was probably 30, almost 30. And I realized that they deserved to be chronicled in all of their wildness.
00:02:37.140And they're, you know, I realized just how different my household was. My mom was a hoarder. My dad was just schemer extraordinaire. You know, I wasn't always dishonest on purpose and deceitful, but he was always getting us in trouble and getting into new inventions and schemes and other things.
00:03:01.640So I always knew there was something there.
00:03:04.540I really knew we were different after I was an adult.
00:03:08.520And then once they were gone, you know, so they died in 2013 and 2015.
00:03:13.920Once they were gone, it became very clear to me that as time elapsed, who they were was less accessible to me.
00:03:24.120and what really happened with my parents was even less accessible because they were such
00:03:29.800lifelong exaggerators, liars in some ways. It was kind of like, wow, did that happen in my childhood?
00:03:36.540Did my mom really did that? You know, it was those sorts of questions were coming up. And
00:03:42.180so I decided to research them like a journalist and write their story.
00:03:48.080There's so many like small moments that are sticking out to me right now. One is from the
00:03:53.060intro your last name growing up was long and you talk about how you were on your own island your
00:03:58.320own longs island which i thought was very clever but like that idea that like the way that you did
00:04:03.300things as a family was different or the first time that you went to someone else's house
00:04:08.280who had less money than you did and you saw that they all had like that their forks were all the
00:04:14.760same instead of having like you know like individual forks for each person like it was very
00:04:20.320like different for you and your mom reacted to you noticing that to be like oh well they do they
00:04:27.480think they're better than us do you think they're better than us right the other one and this is
00:04:32.120from like your you piecing together their history before you is that they strapped all the wedding
00:04:40.140gifts onto the top of their car and then drove that story so there's this story about um them
00:04:46.720they had their wedding, they were getting married in Indiana and moving to West Virginia the next
00:04:52.080day, basically. And so I don't know whose idea it was, but this is classic. My parents, they
00:04:57.140strapped all the gifts on the roof of their little car. They drive through the night and stuff is
00:05:02.220falling off. And I don't, I have no idea. I can't as a, as an adult myself, I can't think of
00:05:09.060having wedding gifts on my roof and then letting them fall off and not stopping the car. Like that
00:05:14.640part it defies understanding right it would just have to be like um but that's how they were
00:05:21.720every choice they made was questionable and kind of chaotic right like they just were doing
00:05:28.460there is huge chaos energy that like and we'll get to this as we as we move through the questions
00:05:34.880like for someone who is pretty organizationally minded like the way that my mind works
00:05:40.860that's part of the reason I can't stop reading the book is that I have a compulsion to organize
00:05:48.000the life but also it makes me feel uncomfortable like it's these dueling things and I think a lot
00:05:53.780of people have a similar reaction to it um how did you feel growing up did you feel a compulsion
00:05:59.760to organize your parents life like how did you react and cope yes and uncomfortable is the best
00:06:06.160word. I'm so glad you said that word because a lot of times when people think about hoarding
00:06:11.760and living with a hoarder, you would think that the problem is the stuff. There's all this stuff
00:06:17.040around and it's in the way and that's a problem. But the real problem was the sense of comfort
00:06:22.280that I had or didn't have at home. And so my home was stacked up with stuff. I didn't have a place
00:06:31.460to sit down on the couch very easily. When it was, it was mealtime, there was nowhere to sit
00:06:38.040at the table. There were bags of fabric and clothes underneath the dining table. So I couldn't
00:06:43.620even take my plate there. And it was uncomfortable, sort of always uncomfortable in that background
00:06:51.480way. You know, it wasn't like my family was having big arguments, but it was that kind of discomfort.
00:06:56.460and then I did feel a need to organize it because then you're sort of young head you're like well
00:07:01.800if this stuff weren't here I would have an easier time and we would be comfortable and happy I
00:07:08.100actually did endeavor to do a big organization I was the summer I turned 16 this this sounds like
00:07:14.740so nerdy right the summer I turned 16 we moved we were in a new house there were boxes and boxes
00:07:22.640and boxes and bags of groceries that we'd been carrying around like house to house for probably
00:07:27.96010 years at that point. And I thought I would help by putting them away and organizing them
00:07:36.760in our basement. This is in suburban Detroit. And it really felt like this was my big chance to
00:07:43.940like contribute to our family and organize. And I spent weeks in the basement. I even built like
00:07:52.680a plywood shelf and I was putting cans of peas and dehydrated potato boxes and everything else
00:08:00.400on these shelves. And it was not met with, I will say, any gratitude. It was very uncomfortable for
00:08:08.360my mom at that point because that was not what she wanted to have happen.
00:08:12.580Yeah, that's the thing is that, like, from all the reading that I've done, it's like, it's not, you can't fix it.
00:08:31.120So, yeah, he was about four and a half years.
00:08:34.040He is about four and a half years younger than me.
00:08:35.780You know, I think everyone knows how some parenting can be very gendered. And obviously people are different too, right? But, you know, my parents saw their daughter as their fixer, helper, caretaker in ways that they never saw their son that way.
00:08:56.180And we're going to get to some of the difficulties of being an adult, dealing with your parents that are also adults, and the parentification too, just in general, like how this happens.
00:09:08.380But I think this is a good place for us to segue into the questions.
00:09:12.420Your memoir covers so much, but we're going to focus more on hoarding and just thinking more broadly about hoarding.
00:09:19.760we have very culture study style questions that are going to be guiding us through this. So this
00:09:24.180is not a like, we're not no one is expected to provide like clinician style answers here. We're
00:09:30.580just going to be thinking through some of these ideas. Because I think people have developed over
00:09:34.760the course of the last 20 years as hoarding has become, I think, much more visible in American
00:09:40.260culture in particular. I think there have been like, ways that we've come to understand it that
00:09:45.600I think sometimes are pretty narrow and sometimes can be a little bit more expansive. But this
00:09:49.740first question is going to take us way back. Again, classic culture study question. And this
00:09:57.160comes from Rachel, and Melody is going to read it. I'm an archaeologist. I study communities in
00:10:01.980Britain and Ireland from 4,000 years ago. Archaeologists use the term hoard to refer
00:10:07.600to caches of objects that are buried together, often away from settlements as community events.
00:10:13.520In some ways, this is almost the opposite of a hoarder's practice of surrounding themselves with
00:10:18.000stuff in their home and living amongst it. Yet it's clear there is a connection. In both cases,
00:10:23.820the hoarders believe their accumulation of stuff is doing something. They do it for a reason.
00:10:28.900It would be easy to tell a predictable story here of a shift from community hoarding in public places
00:10:34.080to personal hoarding within individual houses. But it also strikes me that there is a deeper
00:10:39.260story about emotive relationships with things themselves and how varied these are for people
00:10:44.200today? What drives some people to connect differently with their things? Maybe we can
00:10:48.940start here with how do you think your mom connected with her things? Yeah, well, in my mom's case,
00:10:55.040so what she was hoarding was a lot of food. It was a big part of it and clothing and then also
00:11:02.660fabric because she was a fashion designer and really talented seamstress. So I think like on
00:11:10.540the fabric and clothing side a lot of that was about her identity you know it was about um a time
00:11:19.080in her life she was doing this hoarding of course when she was in her like 30s 40s 50s and onward
00:11:23.440but she was um I would say thinking back to a time when she was young and bold and creative and had
00:11:33.700a more exciting you know life yeah and that was comforting to her to think about that and to think
00:11:40.420about having choices of what to wear and the possibility that she could sew anything.
00:11:47.260And then with the food, it's tempting to think that there is a use. I heard something in those
00:11:53.800questions about the usefulness of things. And I really did believe for so long that why my mom
00:12:03.540was hoarding food is that she was like a preparedness thing. What if we need it?
00:12:51.840Did she grow up – was her life precarious growing up? I think that's sometimes the very
00:12:57.680armchair psychologist understanding of wanting stuff. It's a reaction to not having enough stuff.
00:13:04.640They lived in a rural setting, which you could kind of understand the food thing that way. They lived modestly, but I never heard about them really being poor. And I don't think that she was insecure for food or clothes or anything else growing up.
00:13:25.880yeah although you know there's another era and she was a rich but um yeah i don't i don't see
00:13:32.420that as a driving factor although again it feels like i think we're always trying to figure out0.97
00:13:36.900the reasons and in some sort of like here's the story here's why this woman had this hard time
00:13:43.020um i don't know yeah i don't i don't think it was that yeah it's so interesting because i always
00:13:48.520think in my like the way my family narrativizes my great aunt's hoarding was that she was made
00:13:57.440responsible for her family during the great depression at a young age so she was parentified
00:14:05.220when she was a teenager and like made responsible for all the domestic stuff and then as she grew up
00:14:11.080then she just like you know would buy the sale sheets at dillard's and then
00:14:17.220never get rid of them ever again right yes um and i think that like that's an easy explanation for
00:14:24.620there was a lot more going on with my great aunt bernie yeah than just clearly right like there
00:14:32.320are some other complicated psychological things that are happening but sometimes we love to like
00:14:37.500grasp at like, well, she grew up in the depression and people from the depression hoard or have
00:14:46.140And I don't, I really don't think that's true.
00:14:49.080You know, we, I think we all know plenty of people who grew up in the depression or we
00:14:52.620have known them and they're not hoarders.
00:14:54.480So it is something particular that begins to take hold in people.
00:14:59.760I mean, I always say this, but it's mysterious.
00:15:03.120Every person is mysterious in why they behave in the way they do, but I don't know why my mother couldn't do this. I think it was somehow related to what I said before, something around her identity and her sense of self that she always struggled with. So it's deeper than something I could diagnose or understand about her.
00:15:28.020What were the conversations like if you ever tried to poke at that question?
00:15:36.820I mean, to say that she was defensive is a real understatement.
00:15:41.060So and I'll say I know that my mom doesn't come out as the most friendly or sympathetic character in all parts of this book.
00:15:49.140Yeah. But I think what's important to know is she was, on the whole, a very mild presence. She was not ever a yeller or a, you know, and we just didn't have a house filled with strife. Yeah. We had a pretty fun house. You know, this discomfort was simmering underneath, but it was a pretty, it was very loving, pretty fun house.
00:16:14.440So it wasn't like my mom is always on edge and she can turn on you. But if you said to her, mom, the fridge is terrible. Let's clean it out. That's when you would get like that was the problem. Like she really would not be able to tolerate that conversation in any kind of a civilized way.
00:16:34.400I was reading some of the book stuff compulsive hoarding and the meaning of things which is written by two psychologists and one of the things that they point out is that a lot of people who have hoarding tendencies they are totally fine in their spaces when it's just them and it's when they feel surveilled in some way that they feel the shame that they they don't want to feel shame about it like they actually they think that like what they're doing is totally normal.
00:17:02.940But when someone else makes them feel shame about the thing that they're doing through presence or through surveillance or through pointing out, let's do something about the fridge, that's when you get those reactions.
00:26:10.200A part of like what I'm hearing, first of all, is that the items give you joy. And I think that's actually a difference. Because I think sometimes people who are hoarding, it's not exactly joy.
00:26:24.900I mean, it wasn't my mom's case. She couldn't live without all this stuff.
00:26:28.360Yes. Or memory, right? Or like an understand, like an appendage of self. And when you think of something as part of your extension of who you are, your identity, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's joyful.
00:26:39.660I don't think of my toenail as giving me joy, but it does feel essential to me.
00:26:45.480And then the other thing that I've read about as pretty straightforward is organization.
00:31:18.660And so this incident that we were just talking about happened during the something like year and a half between when my dad died and when my mom died.
00:31:27.460So there was this period of time that was very dark, which was my mom was really on her own.
00:31:33.680And she, except for me, but, you know, my mom and dad together were the Bonnie and Clyde of the Midwest, right?
00:31:42.100Like they just, they enabled each other.
00:31:44.780if you want to get pop psychology about it, but they really forgave each other in profound ways
00:31:50.740constantly. Always stuck up for each other. And yeah, they were quite a pair together.
00:31:58.480I'm thinking of this memoir that I read earlier this year. It's called American Bulk. And the
00:32:04.780author is Emily Mester. The subtitle is Essays on Excess. And I thought that it was really
00:32:10.520interesting because her dad was a hoarder, but her dad was a rich hoarder. And so would just
00:32:16.180buy houses and fill them with like expensive electronics. And so it wasn't the same sort of
00:32:24.820like what we think of as objection because it wasn't smelly. Right. You know, it was still too
00:32:33.300much. And it was still it sounds like it was interrupting their lives. Right. Or it was just
00:32:38.260inconceivable to her right she's like dad like stop buying televisions or like atvs and like
00:32:47.240pay attention to me and and that too i think is part of it's like focus like where is the focus
00:32:52.560in our family yeah and we had you know i don't want to say we had issues but there were plenty
00:32:57.620of things to do parenting my brother and me and you know my mom's job and everything else and her
00:33:03.200marriage and um it was hard to see her pour so much money especially but also time yeah into0.64
00:33:11.880this thing that she was obsessed with doing and you know feel like well she doesn't she barely0.94
00:33:18.040ever like went to my high school I attended or knew what was happening I kind of that's a little
00:33:23.780bit of a 90s thing though I think that more 90s 80s 90s girls were like go to school like I'm not
00:33:29.400gonna think about it she also took pleasure in like like this gets to sort of the deviance thing
00:33:35.920this story is never gonna leave me that like there was this person in your neighborhood or
00:33:40.580like in your community who had like a famous chili cook-off or like a chili not a cook-off
00:33:46.180a chili it was like maybe a super bowl party and it was like bring anything you want just don't
00:33:51.740bring chili and for three years your mom brought chili of course she brought chili like that you
00:33:57.480know, because the rules were don't bring chili. And so that's how my mom kind of got through the1.00
00:34:06.700world. And I think it's, I think she saw it as like distinguishing herself in some way, but like
00:34:10.880she couldn't do anything else but bring chili because she was told not to. So, you know,
00:34:16.640you're supposed to bring a side dish to this party, but not my mom. I love the detail too
00:34:21.640that she brought it in her own crock pot. Oh, yeah. And showed up and was like, can I plug this
00:34:26.680in, you know, like she, you know, was just, she was just going to do that. And she, and I remember
00:34:33.440that trait in her. I remember when I was an adult having things like when I had a new baby
00:34:39.240and she would want to come visit all the time, I would say, okay, mom, we'd love to see you.
00:34:46.480I'm free all weekend, but Saturday at four, there's this other thing happening with whatever.
00:34:51.800So, you know, and so when do you think she would come?
00:35:01.120But I think it was similar to what I was saying before about the hoarding being this part of her where she was like, well, I'm going to do something bad and see what happens.
00:35:43.700I suspect it's about time, wanting to honor the time, feeling a scarcity mindset about the time
00:35:51.960we have here on earth, as if we lose the object that represents the time, we also lose the time
00:35:58.240that we invested in it. I'd also love to explore practical ways of sorting through the stuff
00:36:05.020mentally and physically. I don't necessarily want to go through page by page, but I also
00:36:11.880don't just want to light it all on fire. I'd love to be able to cut bits out and stick them
00:36:18.280somewhere fun to leaf through for memories. And then it becomes my hobby preserving memories for
00:36:24.740the family. Because if it was up to my husband, he would just light it all on fire. So I guess
00:36:31.900there's a few questions here around the psychological, the practical, and the gendered.
00:36:37.400Wow, there's so much happening in this question. And I think a lot of people like millennial Gen X can relate to it because now is the time when a lot of like if parents have passed or are downsizing that you are your stuff is foisted upon you.
00:36:56.140yeah i had to do this two years ago so it's it's in my recent memory and i keep like in the context
00:37:04.020of this conversation i keep thinking about one of the stories from stuff where like um the book
00:37:09.400stuff where one of the psychologists is meeting with a woman and she can't throw away different
00:37:13.880things because like there's like an atm stub and she has written on it what she did with the money
00:37:19.760that she got out from that atm and for her throwing away that receipt was throwing away
00:37:24.900her connection to that day in her life. And so sometimes I think the accumulation
00:37:31.040is memory. It's memory hoarding. It's time hoarding like that.
00:37:34.480Which I actually think is beautiful. I mean, I have some things like that too,
00:37:39.260that are just important to me that I love to remember and little objects. And keeping,
00:37:44.620here's the thing, keeping that ATM receipt is not a big deal in your life, probably,
00:37:50.300unless you have 7 000 of them exactly exactly or even if you just kept atm receipts right
00:37:57.840maybe like if you kept them and you had them organized and like you were like this is how
00:38:03.220i'd like keep track of who i am and who i was it's a diary yeah totally like no one's like
00:38:08.960oh this person has their planners lined up very carefully from every year like no one's like0.95
00:38:14.620brett cavanaugh and his testimony how he saves all his stupid planners then we're like oh what0.98
00:38:19.620a hoarder right it's like here's a guy who saves like a place where he marked down his memories0.99
00:38:25.260and for me like what I did when I like I tried to carve out some space to be very like present with
00:38:33.520it and I like touched things I like tried to create a sense memory of it and allow myself
00:38:40.920yeah and also allowed myself to feel the emotions like that's one thing I've heard about is like
00:38:47.120effective treatment for people who are hoarding is sometimes they hoard the thing because they
00:38:52.040don't want to deal with the the really strong emotions I feel like what happens when you
00:38:57.140actually think about that thing and losing and giving that thing away like I'm reading my notes
00:39:02.240from eighth grade and I feel like embarrassment shame ridiculousness like you're feeling so many
00:39:10.400things um but I also I didn't need to feel that again and again and again like I didn't need them
00:39:17.700there as like talismans of like who I was I I remember who I was when I was 13 and I don't need
00:39:23.160them to to root me to it but I also think like there's something in this person's question that
00:39:27.920she's like I want to keep this stuff for like family memories but they're not for the family
00:39:33.980they're they're not memories for the family they're memories for her yeah yeah yeah look
00:39:40.020I don't see anything wrong with keeping letters and notes and in some of those things you know
00:39:46.080that um that's beautiful in a way and I'll say that when I was writing this book I was again and
00:39:53.260again drawn to contemporary sources that I had and some of those were letters right letters I
00:39:59.600wrote to my friends in high school I have a high school friend who I saw a couple years ago and she
00:40:03.920handed me this letter in person and I had written it to her in 1994. It had a great detail in it
00:40:10.640that made it to the book. And I love that stuff that to me, those are invaluable windows into
00:40:16.780who we were and what we cared about. And, you know, so I'll never say you should shred your
00:40:22.800old letters. That's, that's different. I think when it comes to things that are less personal,
00:40:29.180you know papers and other things um there's a lot more room to get rid of things and look if you
00:40:36.760have a lot of space and you have a lot of time and it's not in your way it's it's that's a
00:40:43.600different that's not hoarding at all you know that's just having stuff and I will say I tend
00:40:49.360to hang on to things because it's like the um I'm delaying the decision about let's get rid of it
00:40:55.200So in my office paperwork and this and that, I'll, you know, print something out and work with it and then set it aside. And I don't necessarily recycle it that day because I haven't decided yet. Oh, maybe I want to go back to it. But, you know, once a month, once every two months, you kind of go through things and you realize, okay, well, I'm glad I kept that around for a few weeks, but I'm done with it.
00:41:18.040And so it's like being in that cycle of when you're going to get rid of things is healthy, I think.
00:41:25.340And it's not essential to do it like every minute.
00:42:03.400But that whole process of decision making, I think is common, necessary.
00:42:08.960I think we all either do it or need to, but it's not the pathology of hoarding, which is like, it's out of the question that I'm going to get rid of this stuff because or use it because this comfort security blanket for right comes back to the appendage feeling for sure.
00:42:27.140Okay, this next question gets more into the gender labor part of this, which I do want to touch on a little bit. This comes from Tessa and Melody's going to read it.
00:42:35.460In the past 10 years or so, with the rise of organizational content on social media,
00:42:40.560I feel like the Overton window on what constitutes hoarding has shifted,
00:42:44.560with a trend toward extreme organization making even minimal clutter seem unacceptable.
00:42:50.320As someone who has always leaned towards having fewer things, clean surfaces, and organized belongings,
00:42:55.940even I am feeling the social pressure to make even my most utilitarian areas pretty all the time.
00:43:01.860What is the differentiator between clutter and hoarding?
00:43:04.960It seems like this should be fairly objective, but instead we seem to see it fluctuating over time.
00:43:10.100And to what extent is this, like so much of internet culture, totally gendered, with men lacking total awareness and women taking on the burden of meeting societal expectations?
00:52:46.980with someone who has these behaviors in my life.
00:52:51.480And so obviously we're not going to solve anyone's problem,
00:52:54.600but maybe just provide some empathy. So this first question comes from Brianna.
00:52:59.260I grew up in a hoarder house where both my mother and father could not get rid of anything.
00:53:05.280Our garage was filled floor to ceiling with every tool on earth that you could possibly think of.
00:53:11.840Different parts for all of our cars, random pieces of old and broken furniture.
00:53:18.120My mother would stack boxes of tiles she found at a garage sale for that one day that we might
00:53:24.440eventually change out the flooring in the bathroom, or different clothes that she'd0.88
00:53:30.780collected from thrift stores throughout her life to make sure we always had something for a Halloween
00:53:35.060costume. While this impacted my childhood more than anything else, I refused to let people come
00:53:41.700over, I lied about my home constantly being under construction for a remodel, the biggest impact was
00:53:48.200on my adult self. I hate keeping anything and I will donate or recycle or toss any item I no longer
00:53:56.680need. This includes the crates of old school work, Barbies, trolls, clothes that my mother keeps
00:54:05.380dropping off because she's quote saved them for me so my question is this how do i navigate telling
00:54:12.180her that i don't want these items they have no value to me when i donated my barbies to a family
00:54:18.060friend she was devastated she doesn't know that her china went to the assistance league but she
00:54:25.100keeps bringing more what do i do so this reminds me actually of like where we started this
00:54:31.520conversation. And it's that her mom has a different relationship to these things than she does.
00:54:36.960Yeah. I mean, these were the sorts of conversations that I was just, they felt
00:54:42.540intractable. They felt like I could never get out of or reach a successful place with my mom where
00:54:49.400we were both happy. Either I was unhappy because she kept throwing stuff my way or she was unhappy
00:54:55.840because I wouldn't accept it. So there is no easy answer here, but I do think there's a way
00:55:03.760to reframe it in your head with empathy. It's not your problem. So you can say, I wish I could help
00:55:13.640you with this stuff, but I can't. And you can say, it's sort of like setting a boundary, I guess,
00:55:21.060But if you're determined to bring stuff to me, then I have to take responsibility for doing whatever I want with it, which might be throwing it away.
00:55:30.020So you don't have to give it to me, but I can't like I am not responsible.
00:55:35.240And then the worst thing you have to do is just donate it or throw it away.
00:55:38.780And that's how I was thinking of a reframe is like this is she you are actually a conduit for her actually getting rid of some of the stuff that's in her house.
00:55:46.860she doesn't she's not thinking of it that way necessarily or at least consciously but you don't
00:55:53.500have to tell her and also I mean I think that I think maybe she does have to tell her because
00:55:57.880it sounds like a situation where she will be asked later check on the stuff I gave you this
00:56:04.780where is it yeah so I think you need to you can make it really clear to the person I don't have
00:56:09.900room. I don't have interest. I'm not going to be able to take and use your stuff. And I think
00:56:17.260people who are hoarders, who are giving stuff to family members or whatever, it's usually because
00:56:23.220they feel sort of guilty on some level. Like, well, I have all this stuff. I bought all these
00:56:28.260clothes and now I want to see them used or see them appreciated. And that's what you can't take
00:56:37.120responsibility for is using it yourself or being responsible for assuaging that guilt like you just
00:56:43.720have to be like well don't bring it to me or if you're going to then there's a good chance i'm
00:56:48.600gonna get rid of it do you feel like that focus though like i think in some ways you might think
00:56:55.660that oh i gave it to like a family friend like for this for another daughter to enjoy this right
00:57:00.800like these barbies are having a life abuse but is there a connection to the stuff that it needs to0.99
00:57:06.740like stay where she wants it to be like she wants to determine the place where it goes like that1.00
00:57:12.820sort of totally about control I yeah if my mom ever gave me something and I gave it to somebody
00:57:17.860else it was not that was not a welcome development I would not say that that's what she wanted me to
00:57:23.880do with it yeah so yeah that makes sense whereas I'm like I'm always trying to find like the stuff
00:57:30.260that I no longer have used for for whatever reason I'm like where can this be rehomed where
00:57:36.320will have maximum utility and i struggle with like not having a place not being able to recycle
00:57:43.680something or like something has been used so much that like i can't figure out and i don't want to
00:57:49.800give junk you know like in the whole thing about people just showing up to goodwill with just piles
00:57:54.560of junk and like that's not that's not goodwill's job to sort through your junk oh no oh no but like
00:58:01.040So it's an interesting line. Okay, this other one. This also I just want this person to feel
00:58:06.960like they're seen. So this this question comes from Carly. I can't believe you're doing an
00:58:11.580episode on hoarding. I've been wanting this from my main podcast because the info feels so bleak
00:58:17.080to navigate alone. I'm a child of hoarders, but I've only been able to say that out loud or even
00:58:22.820to myself for a few years. For that reason, a lot of the questions I have still feel desperate and
00:58:29.000personal. So I'm mostly writing in to say thanks for covering this topic. I feel seen just through
00:58:35.200its existence. One thing I'm wondering is if your guest has any recommendations on connecting with
00:58:41.480personal support services from people that get it. Group support, one-on-one therapy, I haven't found
00:58:48.100one that clicks yet. I often feel similarities to people living with addicts in their lives because
00:58:53.660there's a level of delusion I'm constantly interacting with as well as hope for the change.
00:58:59.000It is such a hidden and shame-filled situation in our family.
00:59:04.200I'm in a constant inner battle with myself to go no contact in a desperate attempt to provoke change,
00:59:10.240or to take a harm reduction approach and just maintain any relationship with my parents.
00:59:16.260It is nuts the way just the knowledge of how they live puts constant stress on me,
00:59:21.180even when I haven't been home in years.
00:59:23.680Best of luck with the episode. I hope I can work up the courage to listen when it comes out.
00:59:29.000I have so much to say for this person because it is how I felt you know for a long time and the
00:59:36.580sense of shame is profound right because it's it's how you grow up and you live with these people and
00:59:43.060you just never want people to see how you live I mean that's how I felt when I was a teenager I
00:59:47.280never had people over and um it's it's a lasting feeling that just I would say goes on and on when
00:59:54.260I was an adult and I didn't even before I was really taking care of them in the way that I did
00:59:59.480in the end I still felt shame I didn't feel like I could say oh my parents you know they're they're
01:00:04.120these great people you know they're doing this and that I didn't even want to think about the way
01:00:08.640they live because it felt so dark and so I felt so responsible just for allowing my parents to
01:00:16.760live in the squalor that they lived in you know it's it's um it's deep shame so you are not alone0.96
01:00:24.720in that but I did find a group this was so many years ago now but it was called children of
01:00:32.240hoarders and it is a group that meets around the country there happened to be a chapter of it where
01:00:38.180I live. And I went to this group and I will say the diversity of experiences just in that room,
01:00:48.100the fact that I live in a pretty small town and there were five people there who all had something
01:00:54.920kind of like this in their lives was extremely validating. And it wasn't just that like,
01:01:02.880I can't say I got specific help from those people, but I'll never forget. I mean, I heard
01:01:10.740one woman who was like, yeah, my mom, she goes to Kroger and gets some potato salad every week
01:01:18.400and she never throws out the little deli container. And I just sat there thinking,
01:01:22.920well, that's really insignificant, honestly, compared to what the rest of us are dealing
01:01:27.020with, but okay. And another person spoke and she said, well, my sister has filled her house
01:01:33.620so completely with stuff that she can no longer sleep in it. And she's sleeping in her car.0.76
01:01:40.440And then, you know, when I heard that story, I was like, oh, well, that is so much
01:01:43.700more disruptive than what my parents are doing. So there is a continuum and a spectrum and
01:01:50.860you know you don't know what's out there but um it's really worth it i think to hear other
01:01:57.000people's stories and understand that you don't know how other people are living or what they're
01:02:00.640dealing with it's um that alone is helpful yeah i think this is a very popular piece of advice
01:02:06.640right now and a lot of um online advice and that sort of thing is to just like i'm putting up a
01:02:14.100boundary like I can't deal with it like did that ever feel like an option to you you know I had
01:02:20.820boundaries all the time that I was setting but they weren't boundaries like I'm not gonna see
01:02:28.440you anymore yeah or I'm not gonna take your phone calls that kind of boundary I think probably is
01:02:35.720very helpful and necessary for some people it wasn't for me that kind of thing I think would
01:02:42.980have felt far more problematic ultimately yeah than helpful you know just given the circumstances
01:02:51.460right right family's different but well and I also think that like like addiction going no contact
01:02:57.080like it doesn't if your goal is for a change in behavior that's they can't like they love
01:03:04.480it doesn't matter how much they love you this isn't about them not loving you or loving you
01:03:09.880Like, you not being in contact with them, it's not a cudgel that can, like, change the way that their mind works and is connected to these things.
01:03:19.120I think if anything, doing something like that at that level of extremity would have caused the hoarding to get worse, the passive aggressive stuff to get worse, the self-destruction to get worse.
01:03:34.740And that's not what I wanted, you know, at all.
01:03:37.680so I simply had to say I'm going to do what I can do a boundary as we talked about this
01:03:44.020earlier in the episode when I said I went to clean out my mom's freezer which was over full
01:03:49.120with stuff she wanted me to drop everything on a Wednesday leave work leave my kid whatever and
01:03:55.620drive up there over an hour and I didn't because I had a kindergartner and a full-time job and she
01:04:02.960had other options. And I said, if it's not fixed by Saturday, I'll come up because that's what I
01:04:08.700could do. So I think everybody has to figure out it. And I felt like, yeah, I don't want to do it
01:04:14.260Saturday, but I will. I'm not going to leave work at two o'clock on a Wednesday because other people
01:04:19.860are counting on me. So boundaries, all for it. But I think going no contact is a different thing.
01:04:27.480it wasn't for me. It is for some people. Did therapy help? Yeah. I mean, I hate,
01:04:33.340I don't want to seem like down in therapy, but it helped a little. It was a bad situation.
01:04:38.600Yeah. Yeah. I got through it. I had a great therapist. I only went to therapy for like a
01:04:44.540year-ish. And then honestly, when both my parents were gone, I felt like, okay. I mean, I felt good.
01:04:54.800I felt, I didn't feel like I wanted to talk about it anymore. I mean, later I wrote a book,
01:05:00.980but I was kind of like, okay, well, this is, this was, you know, it's so helpful. Like I was saying
01:05:06.620before, it's so helpful to have someone listen and validate and just hear you and say, oh yeah,
01:05:12.120the stuff your parents are doing is really wrong and weird. That's, that's the helpful part. It
01:05:18.480or it was for me, about a therapy situation.
01:05:38.520So what did the process of writing the book give you?
01:05:42.260So the process of writing the book, I will say, I don't think it was a healing process. I think
01:05:50.920that all the healing happened before I started writing it. I really do. And people can write,
01:05:59.020I was writing in my journal in a healing way prior to this. So my process was satisfying
01:06:08.140because it was sort of an investigation into who my parents were. And I really wanted to know,
01:06:13.820you know, it was like, I was answering the questions that I really had in my heart.
01:06:17.120So it felt good to write in that way, but not like, not therapeutic.
01:06:22.220Yeah. Yeah. That's it. That's such a great distinction, right? Like there's,
01:06:26.320there's the writing that you do as you're working through it, like all of these emotions,
01:06:30.900and then you have that writing and then you can look back on that writing almost with like,
01:06:36.180like as you know because it's part of that process and now that like the idea that some
01:06:41.900of the best writing comes after you've processed is really interesting and I think true I think
01:06:47.480that's right and I did record in writing many things that were happening as my parents were
01:06:55.380going through their stuff yeah like my dad came home from heart surgery and he wanted to have a
01:07:02.360panera bread danish thing that he was spreading all this butter on and you know i'm the last
01:07:09.000person to judge anybody's dietary whatever but it was like it was so self-destructive and
01:07:15.140counterintuitive to what you know we think and i remember writing a little story uh in my just in
01:07:20.800my journal just privately about that because it was like an unforgettable moment yeah and so i
01:07:26.020have a lot of those kind of like moments of how my parents were and how they lived and it's funny
01:07:31.740in its way but I you know so well and that story is very vivid in the beginning of the book like
01:07:37.920I can see that like half inch of butter on top of the pastry and him putting it on the plate
01:07:44.280um I really like I before we started recording I told you that Melody and I had been texting
01:07:51.060back and forth about like how the book had sucked us in and really like it's incredibly propulsive
01:07:56.420It's beautifully written, and I really highly recommend it.
01:08:01.920So if people want to find it, tell us the full name, where you would love for people to find it, and where people can find you on the internet if they want to know more.
01:08:12.040The book is called Destroy This House, and it was published by Summit Books, Simon & Schuster, so it's widely available.
01:08:18.360My favorite way for you to buy it is at your local independent bookstore, please and thank you, but you can buy it anywhere.
01:08:25.420And yeah, my name is Amanda Uli, which is U-H-L-E, and my website is just my name,
01:08:31.380amandayuli.com. Thank you so much, Amanda. It was just a total delight to have you on the show.
01:08:44.220Welcome to Ask Anne Anything. This part of the show is usually just for paid subscribers,
01:08:49.220but today we are letting everyone in on it. I'm Melody Rowell, and for this episode,
01:08:54.460I'm going to ask Anne anything about the whole Patreon move. So Anne, how are you?
01:09:03.060Well, first off, can I just say that everything in my head was that this was going to happen
01:09:08.100at 11 a.m. because when friend of the pod, Virginia Soulsmith, did her move a couple of
01:09:14.000weeks ago that's when it happened to her she lives on the east coast so it happened at 8 a.m
01:09:20.740and we like the person who was my main contact at patreon was like texting back and forth with me at
01:09:26.420like 7 20 and i was like yeah yeah yeah i'll deal with that when i get back from my dog walk and
01:09:31.140left without my phone for the dog walk got back at like 8 0 5 and she's like uh are we good and i'm
01:09:38.140like oh no but it all it all worked out I didn't know what time it was going to happen and I kept
01:09:45.060checking my email to see like the big announcement and then when I didn't check my email for like 10
01:09:52.360minutes all of a sudden my Apple Watch started blowing up with notifications because I had
01:09:58.160downloaded the Patreon app and was getting every single subscriber and comment sent to my watch
01:10:05.480I also had that at the beginning. It was not great.
01:10:09.200I, you know, we should say that we have worked for several weeks on orchestrating this move because we ported over everything that we had published, both in the newsletter and in the podcast.
01:10:20.860But also still, at least for the time being, lives over at Substack because we wanted to preserve some of those commenting threads and that sort of thing as a real resource to people who are subscribers.
01:10:29.840But there were just I cannot tell you the Google Doc organization that was happening in terms of everything that I had to write and like the email that would go out to people who were subscribers just to the newsletter, the email that would go out to people who were paid to the newsletter and free to the podcast, like just so many different iterations.
01:10:51.480It was a lot of work. And then the Patreon team worked really hard on figuring out how we could do this with a newsletter of Culture Studies size.
01:11:04.780So just with the thousands and thousands of people who are moving over, there are bound to be just normal tech glitches.
01:11:11.440Some of them are Patreon's fault. Some of them are user error.
01:11:16.120None of them are our fault, of course.