Not everyone who has household clutter is a pack rat. One key difference, says Southwest Florida-based professional organizer, Roxy Hambleton, is that a pack rat keeps especially unnecessary items – whereas someone whose home is cluttered may simply be too busy or exhausted to tidy up and toss unused stuff.
“Pack rats are ‘I might need it someday’ people,” says Hambleton, who has worked with many over the years. One client kept hundreds of empty milk jugs, in the event she’d have to fill them with water before a hurricane struck. Another client, with a hard-to-fit foot size, bought every pair of shoes she found in that size and never wore most of them.
Why does it matter if you’re a pack rat? Mental health experts say that pack rats often fill their physical spaces to overcome feelings of emptiness in their personal lives. And all that clutter doesn’t actually help fill the void; it often leads to even more stress.
Hambleton helped develop this quiz to help you figure out if you’re just a little messy – or if you’re a bona fide pack rat.
You haven’t gotten around to tidying up and:
a. If company is coming, you can whip it into shape in 20 minutes.
b. You can’t find some important documents you had last week, but you know with an hour or two of cleaning they’ll turn up.
c. Having guests over would mean you’d have to clear some places for them to sit.
You can’t find the roll of Scotch tape you bought just last week, so you:
a. Assume one of the kids moved it and enlist their help finding it.
b. Borrow some from the neighbor.
c. Go out and buy another roll.
Everyone has a collection of mementos. Yours includes:
a. Your child’s baby booties.
b. The ugly Christmas ornament that Grandma made before she died.
c. The last container of dry Cheerios your grown child ate from before outgrowing the toddler stage.
You know you’ll make good money when you sell your collection of:
a. Original, antique Delftware and Majolica.
b. Jewelry handed down to you by family members.
c. Beanie Babies.
When you go clothes shopping and find a great top, you:
a. Pass it by, since you already have plenty of great tops.
b. Buy it and then put it away until you get around to finding the right bottoms to go with it.
c. Buy it and leave the shopping bag on the kitchen counter for a few weeks until you find a spot for it in your closet.
How to rate your packrat tendencies:
Give yourself 0 points for each A answer, 1 point for each B and 2 points for each C.
0 to 3: You don’t let your stuff rule your life.
4 to 7: You are delaying decisions that could help simplify your life.
8 to 10: You are probably a pack rat. Take control: Get help from family, a life coach, organizer or therapist to help you get to the root of your senseless collections, and then, to start purging them.
I came to this website in hopes of finding tips to help me get ready for my new appliances without causing too much pain. I was in the hospital all weekend with my mother-in-law and didn't have time to prepare. Luckily, yours was the first letter I read. I can't thank you enough for your inspiration. I did the best I could in the time allowed today, and did so much more than I thought I could because I read your story. I didn't want to ask for help.
I'm only allowed 200mg of Ibuprofen 3 times a day and a Flexeril,due to gastric bleeding. You motivated me and reminded me that it's my own business and my choices to make. I knew that these appliances were coming today,and was going to spend the weekend slowly preparing. When my dear mother-in-law asked me to stay with her, I was honored. She chose me over her 3 kids! That is a gift I don't take lightly. I am blessed to have so many people who trust and rely on me. If they knew of my pain, they might not ask my help. But that rush of gratitude is the best medicine.
May God continue to bless your beautiful spirit. I will think of you often. Kathy
I have Rheumatoid Arthritis over most of my body, Osteo. Arthritis, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, 25% loss of nerve feeling in my legs and feet from insulin dependent diabetes, neuraphthy in my feet and hands,a chronic inflamation syndrome, Sjogrens disease, numbness in both hands about 1/2 the time, irritable bowel syndrome, slow metabolism which messes up my digestive system constantly and results in alternating diarhea and constipation, stress and urge incontinence despite 3 bladder tackups, and I am having another surgery tomorrow on my knee to repair torn cartlidge. This same knee was operated on in June of this year. I have had surgery on my ankle, both knees, and my shoulder in the last 3 years. I also have to take medicine daily to prevent migraines which still happen sometimes.
I didn't list these illnesses for sympathy, and I seldom tell anyone that I have any of these problems. I teach high school, and work 50 to 60 hours a week or more. Some days I barely make it to work because of the pain, and I take 22 pills a day plus pain patches. I don't let my students and colleagues know I have these problems, and don't expect the administration to treat me any different than anyone else on the faculty. They don't know I have these problem either. My pain management doctor fusses at me because I don't take as much pain medicine as he thinks I should, but I tell him that My State Of Mind is one of my best medicines.
Don't clean and straighten your house! That's fine, but stop feeling sorry for yourself. I am 61 years old and have suffered with these problems for 10-12 years, and they have progressively gotten worse. I am a widow and I have 3 married children who are very busy with their own lives. I take care of myself and don't whine about the hand I have been dealt. It doesn't make things better. I am renewing my teaching certificate for 5 more years in January.
If you give in to your problems they will overwhelm you. I need a reason to get out of bed in the mornings, or I won't get up at all. Retirement is a dirty word!!
I am a very organized person -- make that was a very organized person -- until I became extremely ill years ago with what I thought was the flu. It was either 2000 or 2001, right after I had split with my now ex-husband and was running a fever of about 105 degrees Fahrenheit for about four days. No matter what I did, the fever remained. My then-physician advised me not to go to the E.R. because "you could catch something worse", since there was a flu epidemic and all the E.R.s were filled to capacity.
At the time I thought that reasoning was logical, but since then I've come to realize it was idiotic. I never seemed to recover from that "flu"/virus, and another doctor I saw monthly insisted I had fibromyalgia. "No," I told him after researching the symptoms online. "The pain I have in my neck and head and shoulders and arms and torso and legs is from the injury, the whiplash and concussion, I got in the 1988 car accident when I was hit by that red light runner." Thank God he insisted, because it was he who did the paperwork to get me SSDI which it turned out I would desperately need later when in 2003, trying to get through nursing school while in torturous pain, that I suddenly had an experience I had never before had in my life.
It felt as if the top two layers of my skin had been ripped off to expose my nerve endings, which then were stretched out just enough so that they could be sufficiently exposed in order to be doused with gasoline, rubbing alcohol, lemon juice and salt before being set aflame. I couldn't bear for even a sheet to touch my skin. I remember my mother taking me to the hospital but not much afterward except laying on a stretcher/gurney and thinking that I must be dying because no one could be in so much pain and not die. Initially, I was frightened of dying. Then, when I learned that the pain was something I would have to live with and that I wasn't going to die, that was even worse.
I was then again diagnosed with fibromyalgia, and then again and again and again even though I had willed myself not to have it and wished it away as hard as I could. Needless to say, due to the pain and the "fibro fog" (I call it early onset Alzheimer's or broken brain and even brain on pain), trying to keep up with sorting mail, scheduling repairs, and simply keeping up with the bad luck that has plagued me for many years and which I believe contributed to my fibromyalgia. This includes my "subconsciously" choosing from an ad in a newspaper, according to my mother, only jobs that featured bullying, demanding, unrealistic, irrational, illogical bosses who required that I do everything from "mandatory volunteerism" to putting in 16-20 hours a day seven days a week (which still wasn't enough!).
But the SSDI payment wasn't something I could live on, at only $600 a month, nor did I have health insurance, so against my then-rheumatologist's advice, I began applying for jobs and going on job interviews. Even though I already had a B.A. in journalism and P.R., I had gone back to school to study nursing because after sending out more than 1,200 resumes over a period of two to three years, I had not received a single interview.
I wanted to get off disability but didn't feel I was well enough to do so, so I searched for a part-time job. I interviewed for one or two of them, but didn't get them. I only applied for jobs at government entities (the city, county, state, etc.) because I believed they would comply with the A.D.A. Wrong!
I wound up getting a full-time job, a "dream" job that normally I would be very happy about but really wasn't. I liked the tasks, but I was exhausted and could never have coped were it not for the injections and medications my then-rheumatologist was giving me. But my boss didn't like to see my medication vials on my desk and eventually told me, like previous employers, that I had too many medical appointments. She wanted me to not go to physicians or schedule all my appointments after work (which I couldn't do since she had me working so many hours). It seemed like she was punishing me for being sick (I guess it's a sign of weakness just like stuffing 32 hours worth of tasks into just 24 hours and not sleeping for years on end makes us "strong") and would insist that -- even though the work day was over that if I left even a half-hour early for a doctor's appointment that usually was near my home and not downtown where I worked -- that I drive back to the office that day/evening and work more hours or just put in more hours over the weekend and late into the night. She also insisted that I should schedule all of my medical appointments on a Saturday or Sunday, which I couldn't because the doctors' practices weren't open on weekends.
In any case, the stress of my "The Devil Wears Prada" boss constantly berating and criticizing my work, saying that I didn't spend enough time "perfecting" projects (although she praised me to others and praised my work when she thought it came from someone else) along with my lack of sleep eventually made me even sicker, and the worsening of a cardiac arrhythmia I had which nearly killed me (thanks to insurance rules) wound up putting me in the hospital. Once there, of course I was supposed to call my boss every day to let her know if I was going to be in or not in, and one morning I failed to call since I was undergoing a cardiac catheterization. That was the day I was terminated.
It came as somewhat of a relief, however, because it meant that I would no longer have to keep throwing my mail and other critical papers into boxes nor would I have to keep bringing Department of Labor/FMLA forms to the boss from every doctor I was seeing. I was told that boss didn't "trust" that I was ill and that she didn't care that she was breaking the law by insisting that each time I saw another doctor, I provide her with a form from that doc until one gave a specific date by which I would be miraculously cured of an incurable condition.
Thank God I had been terminated within the SSDI "work attempt" period of time so that I could continue to get disability, although I wish that Social Security would help people like me since I couldn't get any help from anyone at the county for which I worked. In fact, when I did ask for help, I would be sent 20-page forms with hundreds and hundreds of detailed questions that no doctor would ever have completed. Even when I was younger and healthier, I couldn't have completed it. Hence, another problem for people with terrible pain as it relates to disability: Forms designed by those who apparently have no idea that most doctors will not complete such long forms or do much of anything to help a patient. I've had many doctors tell me before, when I was working, to quit my job and say I should be on disability but then tell me they didn't have time to complete a form for me.
Other doctors who know that if I'm lucky, I can bathe or shower once every two weeks or so, that I haven't eaten a solid meal in years because I have no energy to shop, cook or chew food, that I'm extremely clumsy and drop everything, run into furniture, trip and fall and can worsen my pain just by moving my head, my hands (like typing) and by driving insist that I can and should be working.
So I have tons of clutter which I keep trying to deal with but which seems to increase (I open mail over the recycle bin now and shread a lot!) and overwhelm me especially when my pain is so bad I can't do anything but lay down and hope seven dwarves show up to help.
My mother has M.S. and was recently in an auto accident which injured her so that she had to have emergency surgery and spent three weeks in the hospital, so she's got quite a bit of clutter herself. I think she's solved a good deal of her problem by not turning on her computer for the last year or two. I often think that would be the way to go, except it is convenient in many ways.
For example, since I was just diagnosed with R.A., a "new pain" that I wasn't expecting and which seems to be making my fibro pain worse, I hope I can find some advice and help somewhere because I am in so much pain I can't sleep and I feel that I am losing my mind.
I have narcotics/opioids for pain but I can't take them because of the side effects (oxycodone gives me hives all over my body and makes me itch terribly; morphine IR causes me to get a rash all over and makes my eyelids swell, almost to being shut; Fentanyl pain patches won't stay on; I could go on). The gabapentin I take and the aspirin I also take (more than I should but I'm desperate!) don't seem to be working for the R.A. pain, and I'm at the end of my rope.
If only there were a "pain hotline" to call to "vent" to someone about pain.
Anyway, I'm keeping at this clutter as best as I can because I really hate clutter and hate having a lot of "stuff" and really would prefer to have nothing. Truly, since my health went south and my family and "friends" abandoned me, nothing has meaning for me any longer. I have even become an atheist. Despite this, I was donating thousands of dollars worth of stuff for years to charities and selling on Amazon and Ebay, but when I got sick, that was the end of that.
And here in AZ, it's hard to find anyone to work for money, anyone who knows what they're doing who will work for money, people who advertise a specific service but then never return phone calls, and so on. In the past, I hired a professional organizer (I used to actually be one myself) but she charged a lot and helped me very little. I have no friends or family to help me so I'm on my own.
Again, thanks so much Jill Tyrer because this is the first and only article I have ever seen that mentions other reasons for not dealing with clutter. Everyone else who writes about it or who has a website assumes it's a "motivation" problem. I never had a motivation problem until I wound up in so much pain and with so much "dead-like" drained-of-all-my-blood exhaustion.
I think pack rats have more difficulty letting go and often despise waste--a legitimate concern in our throw away materialistic society--and this may drive them to not throw out things others would toss without a thought about how their actions impact the planet. For example, I know in my case, if I could recycle my #3, #4, #5 and #6 plastic containers, they would be out of my house immediately, as my recycled #1 and #2 plastic containers, glass, aluminum and magnetic metal items are. Since I can't, I save them and try donate to programs that can use them (the art dept in my high school), but there is a limit to what others can take and it is very difficult (here is where the pack rat neurosis takes over) to just throw something away that I know could be put to good use in the right circumstances and that will just end up enlarging a land fill.
Same with useful articles I have torn out and filed, but have no time to reread, newspapers I have not had the time to skim yet (read newspapers are immediately recycled), paper written only on one side that can be used for scrap paper (again immediately recycled as soon as used for a shopping list, note to my spouse, anything that one uses scrap paper for). It is the difficulty in stopping the saving that distinguishes pack rats from others. OTOH, I always have things that others can't locate because they something useful out.
There were no instructions prior to the quiz.
I had to GUESS what you wanted me to do.
I finished with a score of "2," but it wasn't worth the STRESS I had to go through to find the answer.
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