[Lie] Okay so, cowboycrustation says I have to post or he’s gonna pinch me 🙀
I currently seem to be somewhat less doomed than previously seemed likely. Turns out a kind critter contacted another who called for helps and yet another popped up like “Hay, we have a room just for critters like that one!” So now I’m here in a lil room of a four-critter family’s place, in neat lil area @.@ It’s gonna be awkweird but I’ve got somewhere to be other than frozen Minnesota street doom and there are critters trying to help me so I’ve got at least some kinda chance of getting by up here. Am sleepy now but the looming threat of crabby pinchings and/or pinchy crabbings compels me to post something so here it is :P 😅
Lots of new experiences, too. Hanging out playing board games on the floor of my hotel room with my new friends, who didn’t even know each other… that was neat 😅 Neat day. Better than the previous one. I think. I don’t really know what happened that day. Anyway, some things are happenifying. Also it’s kinda cold here 😅
Oh, the city looks super different than my initial impression. I suppose part of that is riding in a car versus riding a bus or train, but it looked much more familiar on the way here. Also being daytime probably helped a lot. My initial impression was like, dark and enclosed and often a lil bit lost, riding light rail with a bunch of smokers, trying to navigate Mall of America with eighty bazillion hunams in it @.@ D: 🙀 … That sort of thing. Muchly different! Anyway, I’ma nap or something now. @.@ 😴
I completely agree with you, Zorsith. It’s easy to have survivor’s guilt and feel bad about it and feel like you were making something out of nothing. But the problem is, retrospect can minimize things in one’s mind. Getting out and surviving can lead to “oh, well I’m here in one piece so it must have not been that bad” but it was that bad.
I have a family member that has (and continues to add to) a hoarder house, minimizing issues scares me a bit. I’m talking massive two story house with basement, multi car garage, etc, with 1 foot wide paths between floor to ceiling piles of things. Maybe 2 small rooms that can be used, sleeping in a recliner because they can’t get to their bed. “It’s not that bad” can be horrifying.
My parent is a hoarder too, though it’s not quite to the extent of yours. Mom’s gotten slightly better about it. She keeps the bulk of her stuff in two office buildings (six rooms total), the entirety of our old house, and the attic at my grandma’s house. It took years of throwing a hissy fit about how awful our house was and how I was embarrassed and ashamed to bring friends over (can relate to those one foot paths, always had to hop over piles of stuff to get to the bathroom) to actually get her to give away and move some stuff out. I get really triggered if I see a pile with a sheet covering it, gives me awful flashbacks. On the plus side, I can live in pretty much any condition because I grew up in such a rat’s nest.
She’d always minimize that shit. Called me spoiled, said that since we didn’t have a garage so the room in the middle of the house was like our garage (bullshit and who tf puts four year old bags of chocolate and piles of expired toiletries in their garage). Said that our house was so small and most people have more room for storage (the house isn’t small at all. Three bedrooms and plenty of space). The hoarder gaslighting and minimizing is real. Hell, the emotionally unhealthy parent gaslighting and minimizing is real.
Thankfully it isn’t a parent in my case, a grandma. None of it can realistically be given away as it is infested with fleas and other insects, and smells of cat urine and death. My parents won’t go in anymore, I started refusing years before them. I’m told there are storage units as well 😔
I’m grateful my mother nipped that behavior in the bud the second my dad started displaying it.
That’s depressing AF. I wish hoarders would realize how much their actions affect other people.
Best we can do is better ourselves, pay attention to the signs, and help others understand. It’s a deep hole to fall into, and not everyone is able or willing to take the offered hand to climb out sadly
So true. Sometimes I hear that little voice in my head that’s like “don’t give this or throw it away…what if you need it for something.”