When a Collection Becomes an Obsession

When does a collection become an obsession? I ask myself that question all the time. At times, I feel like I know the answer, and at other times, I look around me and wonder. I think I worry more about it than most people simply because I grew up with someone who tended to obsess over collections…and not just her own.

My mother was an avid collector of…well everything it seems. Sometimes the collections were cool, or even useful. Like the glass apothecary jars, she would buy at garage sales and the flea market. She had hundreds of them, in every size possible, but they all served a purpose, and they were neatly displayed on shelving in our kitchen. Used as canisters, they held our flour, sugar, cornmeal, tea, coffee, baking soda, and everything else you can think of, right down to the cinnamon, nutmeg, and cayenne pepper. Whenever Mom bought kitchen staples, she carefully dumped the contents of the box, bag, or can into the jars, labeled them, and put them on the shelf in order by size and priority (flour, then sugar, as per tradition) or alphabetically (the spices). I thought it was so cool. I never gave any thought to the idea that it might be an early warning sign of much bigger problems.

My mother was always a bit obsessive about things. If she had a hobby, she was all-in…at least until she got tired of it. She was even known to record a song over and over on both sides of a cassette tape so she could have it on repeat ad nauseam. I couldn’t listen to the theme song from Grease for years after that torture. We laughed about it then; we thought she was just quirky. 

In the podcast this week, we talked about her obsession with buying collectibles. These collections started for herself…Kiss memorabilia, NASCAR gear (especially Rusty Wallace), and shoes. Oh, the shoes! If she found a pair she liked, she would buy them in every color available. The same went for pants and blouses, too. They would all be identical (or nearly so) but in different colors.

Mom also started collecting things for other people. I think I mentioned on the podcast that she started my sister on a black-and-white-spotted cow collection. After a neighbor gave me a few sunflower-themed dishes, she started buying anything with sunflowers on it to give to me. She did the same with piano and music-themed items for my husband. She even turned a vinyl LP album into a clock for him once. I think, in her mind at least, she knew that he is a musician and so he must love all things related to music. That’s the way her brain works.

In more recent years, as we have learned more about autism, we’ve come to understand that many of these traits are indicators of someone who is on the spectrum, and sometimes a harbinger of things to come. Although she has never been formally diagnosed with autism, Mom eventually started showing the tell-tale signs of memory loss and fixation that come with the mental disorder known as dementia, which, like the autism spectrum, isn’t really just one thing, but rather a lot of very similar behaviors and conditions all lumped together in an easy to label box. Part of me wonders if the two are related, or if not, what impact the two conditions have on each other. Mom’s condition deteriorated rapidly after my father and sister died, and with no one keeping her behaviors in check, she was hoarding. I don’t know if autism and dementia are related, but I do know that autism had an effect on her dementia and vice versa. Autism created challenges in communicating with her about dementia, and because she interpreted everything so literally, she had no understanding of nuance or degrees. Everything was black or white…there was no middle ground. Her dementia made it hard to set routines, an invaluable tactic for people on the spectrum. It also made it useless to reason with her, since the reasoning part of her brain is what has been damaged.

Last weekend, we celebrated my mother’s 75th birthday. We all bought her gifts of the things she is currently most obsessed with: word search puzzles, odd and fun pens, and stuffed animals. She has quite a collection of them all, and my family happily acquires them for her. It’s what she would have done for us. Now, I just hope that the things I collect don’t become an obsession. I look around my office, and I wonder….

Things Remembered

If you’ve been reading the blogs or listening to the podcast for a while, you know we’ve touched on a lot of topics. And sometimes, after we’ve posted, we think of something we should have said or we suddenly remember something we haven’t thought about in a long time. Like how after talking about the relaxing YouTube videos, I was reminded of the sound of my oral surgeon’s voice when I had my wisdom teeth pulled a few decades back. At first, I thought his quiet drawl was annoying because I just wanted him to say whatever it was he wanted to say and be done with it. I’m blunt. I’m loud. And I hate it when people talk under their breath…usually. But then, during surgery, I found that his calm, soft voice was quite soothing, and it reassured me that I was in safe hands. It’s a silly example, I know, but it’s sometimes the kind of thing that comes up after a podcast recording session or after reading the blogs Christen and Amber wrote for that week.

Memory is funny that way. Little bits of things that stay hidden away for years and years will suddenly jump forward as though they happened just yesterday, triggered by some odd encounter or a random sound or smell. Sometimes, we forget things altogether. Things we should remember, even things that did happen just yesterday, but have evaporated like the morning dew when the sun comes up. The older we get, the more often it happens. And sometimes, we remember things wrong. My husband and I had an argument about this very thing not that long ago.

If you were listening to the podcast a while back, you might have heard our discussion about the fallibility of memory during one of our Eckhart Tolle: A New Earth debates. I mentioned an episode of New Amsterdam in which one of the characters, Dr. Helen Sharpe (played by Freema Agyeman), misremembers an incident from her past, illustrating the fact that our memory is often tainted by our emotions and the limitations of our immature and/or egoic comprehension. My mother is a perfect example.

I’ve probably mentioned before that my mother has dementia. At 74-years-old, she is impaired by Fronto-Temporal dementia, a neurological disorder that affects her memory, judgment, impulse control, emotions, and all kinds of higher functions. She often tells me misremembered stories and tall tales. For instance, one of her frequent narratives is the account of how she lost the toenail on her big toe. She has repeated multiple times that a man stepped on it, and then, before it healed, another man stepped on it. The truth is, she had a horrible fungal infection that we spent over a year trying to treat before the podiatrist finally decided to remove it. No one stepped on it. There was no man. Where she came up with that story, we will never know.

I’d like to write that story off as dementia, and I’m sure it has a great deal to do with it, but truthfully, she’s been telling wild tales for decades…long before any possibility of dementia being responsible. She’s told my niece repeatedly that her mother favored her older sister and would let her go outside to play while keeping my mother inside. Punishment? No. When she was 7 years old my mother had a serious hepatitis A infection that put her in the hospital for months. Her mother wouldn’t let her go out because she was ill, but she doesn’t remember that. A child who can’t understand why she can’t go outside is not going to remember why she can't go outside, and thus, faulty memories are created. My mother has spent her entire life resenting her sister for a perceived privilege that didn’t really exist…or at least, not in the way she thought it did. And that brings us back to the argument between my husband and me.

I won’t get into the specifics of the argument but suffice it to say that it was over a conversation that we had. In hubby’s recollection, we had discussed a very serious matter and he had brought me around to his way of thinking. I didn’t remember the conversation at all… or rather, I remembered a very different conversation that took place months before when I had convinced him to agree with my way of thinking. This was a very serious matter, and so we continued this argument for quite some time, each of us sure that the conversation had ended in our favor. But then my husband described the scene of the conversation, and I realized…we were actually talking about two different conversations! Once I realized what conversation he was talking about, I realized that I didn’t even remember discussing that topic at all during the conversation he remembered. I do remember the conversation and the circumstances around it, but I have absolutely no memory of discussing that topic at that time.

So, who is right, and who is wrong? I don’t know. My memory of that conversation is obviously very different from my husband’s memory, and we are both sure we are right. Maybe we are. Or maybe we are both completely wrong. Or maybe the truth lies elsewhere. I’ve often been told that there are three sides to every story: two points of view and the truth that lies in the middle. So that begs the question, how much of our memory can we trust? It certainly makes me want to revisit memories of pivotal events in my life…did I totally misread things? Am I angry at this person for no reason? Did that really happen?

As we continue our readings of Eckhart Tolle, I am reminded that the past is the past, and that to spend too much time dwelling on it does not make us happy, nor does it ever resolve anything. The past is done. Gone. And it should not affect us one iota. If it does, then we are allowing it to do so. The only time that exists is NOW, and what we do with this time is entirely up to us in this moment.  NOW is the word I chose for this year, and it’s something I am trying to embrace wholeheartedly. NOW is all we have, and I’m ready to make the most of it, but in order to do so, I have to let go of the past. Let go of the hurt. Let go of the anger. And let go of whatever impression or misconception might be clouding my judgment or affecting my behavior. There is only NOW, and everything else is just a mark left on my psyche that may or may not be real.

If you haven’t been reading with us, I invite you to do so. I also encourage you to take a moment to reflect on your own life. Have you ever misremembered something? Have you ever made a decision based on something that turned out to be false? How would you do things differently if you were not affected or influenced by your past? Join us in our Facebook chat group and share your thoughts or add your comments below.