From old blog "Please Do Not Feed the Monkey on my Back"
Original URL: http://pleasedonotfeedthemonkeyonmyback.blogspot.com/2014/06/shaving-bones.html
Hoarding.
It's complicated. It's genetic, neurological, stress-triggered. Imitates OCD in some ways and Addiction in others. There are case studies, brain studies, quantitative and qualitative research, and one vitally import chart...
From the inside-- Hoarding is about a badly broken sense of self. There's no boundary between self, stuff, future, past, feelings, reality... No capacity to navigate between potential, and fact.
The worst thing you can tell a Hoarder is that the you you are actively being in the life that is actually happening right now IS the real you in your real life.
And the easiest things in the world to Hoard, are books. Books ARE extensions of the self. Books are people in pages-- half a conversation trapped in time, with all the power a conversation has to engage, motivate, reassure suspended where you can return to it time and again with new insights and all the while ensconced in the safety of being by yourself.
Books you've read pass themselves off in your mind as free return tickets to the most important places you've ever been... although the truth is you are always a different you, coming back, and it is never again the first time.
And books you haven't read offer the illusion that you can go every place you've ever wanted to be, learn every thing you've ever wanted to know-- complete every you you've ever dreamed of becoming... all in one lifetime.
Then the eyes start to go. And the headaches last longer. And the blessed child you have waited so long for arrives, and the now of life demands a present presence more constant than it ever has before.
And there isn't enough space.
So you begin the process of excising the external brain. You ask the necessary dehoarding question-- "What am I realistically likely to use in the coming year?"-- knowing that in this context it becomes the impossible question "What am I most likely to *think* over the foreseeable future?"
It is time for a gruesome confrontation with the reality of yourself and your life-- the eyes you won't be getting back, the time you won't be having.
All de-hoarding is about dismantling the dreams that have come to be in the way of life. Books are the building blocks of dreams. All surgery is bloody.
But it isn't that simple. You *are*, in large part, the you shaped by those books you had casual, constant access to at a child. The books that were not discovered or recommended, but just there; the books that could be prodded and taste-tested again and again over the years. The antique books. The gilded books. The battered books with the questions in the margins. The books that fall open at a special spot.
You aren't just custom-cutting away the woulda coulda shoulda of your own future-- not just giving up on the teacher, the learner, the doer you wanted to be-- you are also swinging shears through the garden of your child's future daily life with books.
But there isn't enough space.
You must become an expert in issues your friends haven't even thought about. What pictures and charts actually transfer to eReader, and what are lost in transition. How quickly seminal works may be flushed from the library shelves, and which genres are most likely to linger. What memories really need to be at hand on a moment's notice, and what may be safely put "on hold".
And there still isn't enough space.
We have a special term for culling out books by now.
We call it, "shaving the bones."
