We All Have a Little Bit of the "What If I Need It?" Syndrome

Thank you to cohdra at morguefile.com for the use of this image

Hoarding starts for different reasons, but all of us hoard a little. Even neat freaks usually have secret hoards. Your hoard may only be a kitchen drawer or a couple of shoeboxes in the top of the closet, but we all have things we just can't let go of. Mostly because we think we will need them someday.

I have gotten rid of a lot of what I owned -- some sold, some given away, some just left behind -- but I still have things I can't let go of because I might just need them some day. One of those things is office supplies. Back when I had my karaoke show, I was constantly printing out songbook sheets. New songs went on different colored sheets to differentiate them from the regular songs. I also had to hole punch these sheets and put them into plastic sheet protectors in notebooks. I still have reams of colored paper, hole punchers -- both two and three hole -- along with all those song sheets in 11 notebooks in plastic sheet protectors. My plan was to sell them, but it seems they are not worth a tenth of what I spent on them, so I decided to keep them "in case I need them one day." They are in two wine boxes, and they fit perfectly in there. No need to separate them into their components, which will take up much more room. I'll just keep them there until I need a notebook or a sheet protector or some scrap paper to use for God knows what.

But those aren't the only office supplies I have. I had a large cabinet full of them that I hoarded from all my office services businesses over the years. I even have a huge box full of various computer cables that are totally useless now, some that were never even opened after I bought them. I have reams of "scrap paper" that is mostly old song sheets and genealogy stuff printed from the web. I had this thing for awhile about buying up cheap clearance-priced school supplies (who knows why), so I have packages of pencils and notebook paper and folders and about a dozen or more spiral notebooks. I have pens and markers that have long since dried up and become unusable. I have rulers and compasses and paper clips and stick pins and all sorts and sizes of staplers and staples (I had thing for tiny staplers at one time). I have index cards galore. I even have boxes of file folders, though I have no file cabinet. I'm sure there are things I have that I have forgotten about.

Will I ever use these things? Who knows, but I'm not going to let them go. I can't. They are one of the things I made a conscious decision to keep, so they are sacrosanct.

I have gone through every box I now have several times while packing and unpacking. What's left now is what I can't part with -- well, I've DECIDED not to part with. At some point in the future, I may find these things are unnecessary to my security and sense of self-worth, but right now, this is all I have left of 62 years of my life. It all fits into an 11x13 storage room, and soon it will be in a house approximately half the size of the one it came out of.

I'm keeping it. I've done enough to save the planet for now. This stuff is mine, and it is going to be mine for the time being. Will I ever need it some day? All I know is that I'm finding that things I let go of or lost along the way are things I will need and no longer have, so I'm not letting go of anything else, and that's o.k.