Hoarding

On physical and digital collections and the impulse to call something your own



Confession

One thing my friends don’t know about me is that I’m a hoarder. I don’t actually “hoard,” but I like to collect things a lot of other people throw away: packaging, empty bottles, ribbons from presents, stickers (peeling them off), cards, notes, wrapping paper, and yogurt cups. I have a box of Bai antioxidant water bottles, because the structure and smoothness of the bottles feels really good. I have a shelf of paper bags from clothing stores—my favorite is pastel green from Ladurée when I visited Paris. I have a very prized cantaloupe Pocky wrapper that a family friend brought from Taiwan. And I’ve collected cardstock cut from random college brochures (you can tell the size of a college’s endowment by the thickness of their paper.)



Sometimes what I hoard is useful. I’ve recycled lots of Oui yogurt cups and glass bottles to stick wildflowers in. If I carefully unwrap presents, I can reuse unwrinkled swaths of wrapping paper and sparkly gift bows. I always feel acute pain at birthday parties, where ripping paper into shreds is an anticipated expression of joy.



But more than being useful, there’s a lovely tactile feeling I get from packaging. I like the way consumer products are designed: packaging is meant to be touched, held, used, and opened.



I don’t think the designers think about packaging as ultimately thrown away. They focus on how a person interacts with it. They focus on what it reveals, conceals, makes invisible. They focus on creating suspense for the reveal of what’s inside. They know packaging will be displayed on grocery shelves packed with dizzying colors, packaging will be taken by soft and rough hands and brought into pantries and bedrooms and places the designer will never see, packaging will metamorphose into a new life as the guardian of something that is loved. When I dig through my drawers of hoarded stuff, I feel delight. I’ve salvaged something from what would otherwise be thrown away or consumed. I think I can understand the “real hoarders” who hold on to all that passes through their lives.I can’t say it’s all beautiful. But maybe the lost and found boxes are also a kind of art.

Words

I’ve realized that I also like hoarding words. I have 8 commonplace book documents (basically one mega-document which I kept splitting since it literally slowed down my computer), with around 70,000 words. Every time I type or paste a sentence into the document, it feels like I’m claiming it. I often encounter impulses to keep everything I’ve written there secret. I can't imagine ever sharing the entire document, even if I was trying to practice vulnerability. I want to “own” language, even if it isn’t my own. The act of curating makes the language mine. I think it’s a human impulse to form emotional connections with what we’ve collected. When I retweet something on Twitter, I feel like that retweet is distinctly mine. It says something about me. On Tumblr and Pinterest, I reblog and pin other people’s content and pictures, yet I’m attached to my own particular blog. Most obviously, my Spotify playlist is mine. Yet an alien visiting Earth would wonder why a collection of songs I haven’t written, sung, or played can be called my own. Each of us is made up of so many fragments: people we’ve met and forgotten, conversations we think of at night when it starts to rain, stories we’ve absorbed through the surface of our skin, sunsets we’ve seen through stranger's windows, songs we’ve barely heard while passing by in buses and trains, wide-eyed cities with bright trees lining the sidewalks where we've lived during the summer, pieces of colored glass that wash up on beaches, nights we stayed up and watched the passing headlights, voices we wish we could remember, words our parents told us that we repeat to ourselves when alone, photographs that don’t exist or that exist only in the depths our memory. When we collect things, whether material or imaginary, maybe we're trying to piece together the fragments of our self, to piece together all the ways we have been scattered.