On Hoarding
Published:
Growing up in a frugal Asian immigrant household, I was instilled the values of never wasting.
No dish at the dinner table would be left unfinished, not a single grain of rice left in my own rice bowl. My parents would take extra napkins and ketchup packets from restaurants whenever we ate out. We love free samples. We constantly teeter towards the side of “what if this comes in handy later”. And over the years, as you might expect, our house became chock full of potentially useful items.
And born out of this is my strange relationship with hoarding both physically and digitally while obsessing having some sort of order or reason to the chaos. I have a hard time giving things up but when I do, it happens in rapid spurts of carelessness. As a result, I use a shoebox as a catch-all time capsule and kind of a black hole to throw small, potentially sentimental things into.
Sally Kim, a lifestyle vlogger who I follow, stumbled upon her time capsule when she was moving out into her first bought home. Each piece in that time capsule ages like wine, those polaroids with high school friends, letters from them, accomplishments over the years, firsts. I desire that feeling and also have a desire for not losing and capturing the fleeting moments (don’t want to forget the things that happen to me). For that same reason I am writing. It’s my way of taking control of my life and the best compromise against the arrow of time between focusing on living in the present and remembering the past I can think of.