Year ago when I was between jobs, I decided to learn all I could about selling items online, beefing up my eBay profile and setting up a vintage shop on Etsy.
For one thing, it was a handy way to start bringing in some money during a personal time of scarcity. But I quickly realized that finding and selling vintage items also was a great way to translate my love of objects and my eagle eye for weird, kitschy goodness into something more satisfying than hoarding.
Use Your Hoarding Skills for Good
Like any good hoarder, I have a knack for spotting the items that a lot of other people would overlook. Like any good marketer, I can also highlight a particular object’s quirky delights or rare qualities so others can appreciate them as well.
Plus, I get a lot of personal joy from giving gifts to people, and selling online for me is a great expression of that. I can lovingly wrap and package an item as nicely as I would a gift, and the recipient is fairly guaranteed to love it because they selected the item. And they paid me for it. Win-win!
The Joy of Releasing Things
Now that I have expanded my inventory with an influx of my childhood items and other objects repossessed from the ravenous blob that was my parents’ hoard, I’ve discovered other joys from selling.
It’s immensely gratifying to take a neglected item that has languished under a pile of dust for decades and be able to clean it up, store it properly, present it in its glory, and send it off to a new home where it can be more fully appreciated and cherished.
That’s one sorrow of hoarding: Having an overabundance of objects can affect your emotions, physical abilities, thinking and more, but many of those objects are never even used, which makes the suffering feel all the more pointless and tragic.
The other day, I got a wonderful note from one of my customers about a board game he bought from me. He let me know that he’d had one just like it when he was a kid back in 1972. (Here’s the serendipitous twist: He’d bought the dice for the game from a different vendor a couple of weeks before he came across my listing, and the only pieces missing from my version were the dice.) My customer was thrilled because the game I sold was in excellent condition since no one had ever played with it.
That’s one sorrow of hoarding: Having an overabundance of objects can affect your emotions, physical abilities, thinking and more, but many of those objects are never even used, which makes the suffering feel all the more pointless and tragic.
When I’m able to achieve some kind of positive outcome, such as uniting an unused or neglected item with someone who has genuine excitement about getting and using it, it helps makes all of the work from the hoarding cleanup feel like it was worth it.
eBay also allows you to donate up to 100% of your sales to a charity, which amps up the feel-good factor of getting rid of stuff, in case you needed more incentive.
Getting Closure by Saying Goodbye
Beyond that, being able to release objects and permanently say farewell to them gives me a sense of completion and closure. I get to exercise that decision-making muscle as well as practice the art of consciously letting go of things. And those are valuable skills for anyone with hoarding tendencies.
Redirect Your Love of Items
Here’s what I want to advise my fellow hoarders. Once you’ve made the step of changing your interaction with objects and your attitudes about them, tap into that part of your brain that allowed you to see the creative potential or beauty of items. You don’t have to wall that part of yourself off entirely. Rather, redirect it. Find ways to express that creativity without requiring ownership, personal expense, inconvenience, etc.
There are ways to still bring that richness and appreciation — of design, color, functionality, whatever — to your life without doing so through owning objects.
Things change. Things erode. That’s life. Owning something does not make it last forever. You are a temporary custodian of things.
My Rococo Minimalism Mentality
As I’ve said before, I’m no minimalist. At best, I’d be a rococo minimalist. I own things, and plenty of them. Nowadays, I am much more thoughtful about what I bring into my home. The things contained in it have a place. They are organized. I take care of them. I appreciate the sentimental value of some of them, yet I also view them as dispensable. Things change. Things erode. That’s life. Owning something does not make it last forever. You are a temporary custodian of things.
Granted, rococo minimalism might sound contradictory, yet it kinda works if you consider it as a mentality. A minimalist approach to bringing things into my life but a rococo way of appreciating them: playful, expressive, exuberant, over the top, fabulous, colorful, gilded, absurd.
Always remember, Things Can Be Different.
Hope and joy,
Rachel
