Today I collected ten years of personal papers that have long since been processed and scanned and brought them to a Cintas bulk shredding facility in Columbia. The total weight of all the documents combined was a staggering 170 pounds. In total it cost me a flat-rate $75, which would have bought me as much as 500 pounds of shredding in a single "Onsite Purge Service", as they call it.

I almost wish I had closer to 500 lbs of paper to have made it more cost efficient, but on the other hand I'm kinda glad I didn't. I can only imagine the mental energy that fourteen more boxes of paper lying around the basement would have cost me over the last few years.

Of course, I got to watch all my papers fed up a conveyor belt into a machine as big as my house and down a chute in tiny little paper shreds into a big rectangular bale. Seeing that alone was worth at least $25.

Out of all the things that I happen to collect around the house, the paperwork has always worried me the most. Back on November of 2001 a thread was posted on Something Awful by a guy who lived with his compulsive hoarder mother (Good mirror here). I've probably thought of and reviewed that thread once a year since then, and one particular caption written by the son has always stuck with me:

On somewhat of a tangent, we live in Folsom, CA, home of the famous Folsom Prison. One of the perks of living in a prison city is we don't have to seperate out recycleables from our garbage. We just throw everything away, and they drive it up to the Prison and make the prisoners dig through it. As a result of this, my mom will never throw anything away with her name on it, since she's convinced one of the prisoners will steal her identity. I try to explain to her that not only are the odds of someone choosing her identity to steal are slim on their own, if someone is going to try to steal an identity they're probably not going to pick someone in the lower middle class. Still, she insists on cutting up everything, down to the address tags on every piece of mail we get. So most of those pieces of paper there are old pieces of junk mail she won't throw away. She originally used to go through and cut it up every couple of weeks, but now I think we have a few years built up.

There's really two faces of this caption that disturb me. On the one hand, you can obviously see that the mother has overrated a low-probability risk in her own mind as a function of her compulsion. A few years of junk mail taking up space in an already massively cluttered house is crazy. On the other hand, I have always felt like my compulsion to one day effectively and efficiently dispose of piles and piles of personal papers in the most secure way possible was perfectly reasonable. All disorders have their spectrum, and reading this caption and looking at the pictures of a hoarder's house from someone else's point of view forced me to wonder where exactly on that spectrum I sat.

But the deed is done and I have reset all my "must shred" recycle bins back to zero again. The only thing that worries me is that after all these years I finally did do exactly the thing I've been meaning to do, exactly how I wanted to, and the fact that I had saved years and years of papers to do all at once actually made the trip more efficient. So now I have positive reinforcement of something that's been a negative drain on my psyche for some time.

What do you think?

3 Comments | #6459

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