seeds of my disorder

Hi, my name is Honor Regzig, and I am a Hoarder....

Or at least a hoarder-in-training.

Home now, back from dad's, with a trunk full of clean laundry and yet more clean laundry piled on my bed (where do I sleep tonight?) And yet more clean laundry in this jumbo Space Bag (those vacumn the air out things) beside me.
I have more stuff than I thought.
A lot more.
And yet I'm curled on the tiny clear spot on my floor telling myself that it IS ok to throw out this leopard-print sports bra that is so old the elastic is melting through the fabric.
Seriously.
Part of my brain is freaking out saying "we could use the bra cups to make a little pocket of some kind! That part of the bra is undamaged!"
Um...yea if you don't think Yellow With Age counts as damage!
I'm having the same issue with some old tshirts.
Ok to be fair I grew up in a house where old tshirts were used to wrap stuff like glass and sweaters for storage. So MAYBE.
But the old bra?
That needs to go.
My poor cat is all confused.
I'm trying to make this room livable for us both.
It's not normal to have just teeny paths thru one's floor.
I may not be hoarder tv show material yet, since the mess is confined to my room.
But if the whole house looked like my room....yea.
I don't have layers of trash...it's all clothes thus far. No food, no mold, no dead things. Tho I'm sure there are spider corpses around. I do have some cobwebs.
But yea thus far clothes and various purchases (hair rollers and shampoos and toothbrushes found thus far) and a fuckton of recyclables like cardboard and plastic bags.

R dropped by dad's for a few hours and we talked about my room and why I feel this irrational need to stuff my space full.
And again it traces to daddie dearest. How poor he made us. How Mom often had to choose between the house payment or buying food.

How the ONLY reason we didn't get on welfare was because they would not take appointments.
She would have had to take several days off her only job and go sit in line at the welfare office.
So we pressed on.

There is one memory in particular that really stabs this home for me. I don't remember if I've told it or not...but it still stabs me so I need to get it out still.

I was alone at the kitchen table eating some sort of noodle dish, probably ramen. I don't remember how old I was. 7? 10? Young. I reached across the bowl to get my drink glass (water? Dunno) and the glass caught the bowl and the bowl fell. The bowl also bounced off my foot and went up under the table. It was a mess. Noodles were in the joints of the table (it had a collapsing extension of some sort)

What I remember most was the crushing guilt...that my clumsiness had wasted food when we had so little. And how good that noodle dish was and now I couldn't finish it. I was sobbing as I slowly cleaned up the mess, using my fork to pick noodles out of the table joints.

Mom told me it was ok...that I could have some of my little bro's, but that only made me feel worse.
We had so little and thanks to my clumsiness we had even less, and my bro would get less food that night, a sacrifice for my sake and one I certainly did not deserve.

Hell maybe that's when the first tiny seeds of anorexia were planted too.

That sad and guilt-ridden little girl is still there inside me. Still wants to know if it'll all be ok. I got people around me now who love me but I still feel so unlovable sometimes.
It's like being divided down the center. The old messages that I'm guilty and clumsy, learned so young, can't seem to get rid of them. Guilt-ridden as a child, felt unlovable, undeserving..then the "church" that baptized me took that vote and essentially told me I was unlovable... just reenforces the lessons learned so young. It seems all tied together. My compulsion to starve.
And to hoard stuff, including food (tho the food is all in that cubbyhole...I meant it when I said the piles are of clothes etc)

Growing up like that.... I've been stabbed by the Witch King and it just never really goes away.