4-minute read time.
Please enjoy this piece by my little brother.
Hoarding is unique in its inability to be understood by those who have not experienced it. To understand the effect that growing up in a hoarding household has, one must have grown up in a hoarding household. People can empathize with you and try to understand, but they will never get the scope at which it affects a person’s life. Imagine a full dumpster, gross, smelly, filled with trash and rotten food, now imagine living in that dumpster, every day, for every year of your childhood. It’s hard to imagine, right? The average person will likely never have the experience of having to watch where you step in fear of stepping on rotten food or filthy garbage or exposed sharp objects, for me, that was an everyday experience.
Waking up I would go into the upstairs bathroom, which had walls stained with years of water damage and a floor of dirty clothes, with tile peeking through the piles. I would walk into a shower with a tub that was half full of dirty dishes and stained and moldy clothing. The floor of the tub had turned from white to a pale yellow-orange, splotchy with reminders of rotten food that had sat in it. I would get dressed in clothing that was not originally mine, each piece thrifted or given away for free. As my high school had a uniform, the only clothes I had other than a dresser drawers worth of casual clothes were uniforms that I got from former students. Every piece of clothing was wrinkled, or ripped, or stained, and every piece had a healthy layer of fur due to the three cats and one dog. Many times, I would try to use lint rollers to remove the fur, but it always came back. For the last few years of high school, I would bring a lint roller to school, because doing it at home would just lead to fur coming from sitting in the car. Other than having to worry about fur, rips, wrinkles, and stains, I also had to deal with smell. I wouldn’t smell because of poor hygiene, as I always tried to do what I could to be more presentable, I would smell because the house smelled, and because the car smelled. To this day I choose to bring and wear cologne everywhere I go, not as a fashion statement, but because it was ingrained in me as the only way to cover up the smell the house and car would leave on me.
The car was a garbage truck disguised as a sedan, filled to the brim with furniture and old food from food drives, dirty clothing and spider webs. To sit you would place a towel, blanket or plastic bag down so that the dirt and grime wouldn’t transfer onto you, and you would have to tuck your legs and feet up onto the seat, as there was usually no room on the floor. When there was room on the floor you would still tuck your feet up, as putting them down would be equivalent to stepping in dog poo. When my sister was still living with us, before she went off to college, there was room for three (including the driver) in the five-seating 2015 Toyota Camry Hybrid. I would sit in the back, with a mountain of trash next to me and below me. The mountain was as big as I am and was sometimes bigger. When I was going to school and would have to bring a backpack, I would do more than just tucking my legs up, I would often have to squeeze myself in with my head tilted sideways, pressed against the ceiling of the car. Each day I would leave the car smelling of rotten food and garbage, and on the bus, I would reapply deodorant and cologne.
The house was a perfect reflection of the car, every room filled with clothing, garbage, and discarded objects from forgotten hobbies. Strings of yarn stretched from room to room, rolled up carpets were propped against the wall, broken electronics were scattered across the floor. The downstairs bathroom was similar to the upstairs bathroom, with a floor covered in clothing, a dryer, a faulty washer I would have to fix each time I used it, a sink with a layer of dirty dishes and soap bottles, a toilet usually clogged due to having rotten food and spoiled milk poured down it, and a shower with a tub entirely full of dirty dishes, pots and pans. Most of the dishes in the tub were beyond recovery, the pots and pans with a thick layer of rust, and the dishes with a slimy or crusty coating that would never truly come off. Those dishes were never cleaned, never moved, never even acknowledged, they sat there for years until the house burnt down, and they still sit there in the ashes.
