Entropy Part II – the lure of laziness
28 Oct 2011 6 Comments
in Art of Aging, Bipolar mood swings, Memoir, Mental health and illness Tags: depression, Entropy, Julie Lomoe, Laura Bulatao, laziness, Nia, Richele Corbo, YMCA
Nia class with Lisa Geddings
It’s high noon, and my Nia* class at the YMCA is just ending. Over a dozen women sit cross-legged on the floor as Richele says a prayer of gratitude. Unfortunately, I’m not there – I’m just getting out of bed.
No, I’m not sick. I’m just lazy. When 10:30 rolled around, time to don my workout clothes and leave for class, I made the conscious decision to stay tucked in bed under a down comforter, sipping coffee and reading the paper. This is by no means the first time I’ve made this choice. My goal is to hit the Y three times a week for Nia class followed by a weight-lifting session on the Fit-Linx circuit. I love the Nia class, and I always feel better afterwards – happier and more energized.
I’m not crazy about the workout on the weight machines, but I like the feedback from the people following me who are amazed at the amount of weight I lift, and I enjoy ogling the men working their muscles with the free weights.
Recently I skipped two full weeks, for the most part with the flimsiest of excuses – for example, the fact that this summer’s purple polish had flaked raggedly off my toenails. I couldn’t find the polish remover, and I was afraid the other women would look at my toes and judge them scruffy (we dance barefoot in class.) Finally back at the Y Monday, I found the class much more strenuously aerobic than it seemed before, and I couldn’t do as many reps on the weight machines as I usually do.
It’s scary how falling out of shape comes so quickly and easily when I cocoon myself in bed instead of making the healthy choice and hauling my tush off that comfy mattress. It reminds me of the description of entropy from my last post: “a measure of the unavailability of energy in a closed system.” Yielding to the lure of lassitude gives entropy a greater hold on our bodies, and there’s strong evidence it shortens our lives.
There’s a saying that Zen monks recite at the close of each day:
Let me respectfully remind you – Life and death are of supreme importance. Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost. This moment is an opportunity to awaken. Take heed. Do not squander this moment.*
Biologically, as we age, our bodies yield to entropy. Inevitably, if we live long enough, things begin to break down. Our sight and hearing become less acute, our arteries begin to clog and our cells to break down. By making healthy choices, we can forestall the process to some extent, but in the end, our aging bodies fail us. But do succumbing to inertia and squandering the moment speed the journey toward death? There’s evidence they do. So do genetics, poor choices in diet, and lack of a social support network.
I’m getting a tad gloomy here. That’s one reason I took such a prolonged break from blogging – I didn’t want to play Debbie Downer and depress people with my negative thoughts. But I’ve finally found a way to channel my shadow side: my next novel will feature a character who magnifies the worst features of my depressive side. She’ll wallow in clutter, eat and drink too much and spend most of her waking hours in her Lazy-Boy recliner watching TV – when she’s not playing computer solitaire, that is. On the plus side, she’ll have a wicked sense of humor. I look forward to meeting her when I begin the NaNoWriMo novel-writing challenge next week.
How often do you succumb to lassitude and entropy? Do you have any remedies? I’d love to hear from you.
* Nia’s a movement practice that combines dance, martial arts and healing disciplines. For more information, visit www.nianow.com. In New York’s Albany area, Richele Corbo and Laura Bulatao are the Nia teachers who’ve inspired me over the years. The photo is of a class in Bethesda, led by Lisa Geddings.
**I’m indebted to Reverend Sam Trumbore, minister for the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Albany, for this quote. It’s from a sermon he gave in 2004 titled “Praising Percipiency.” You can find it by going to the FUUSA website and clicking on “sermons,” which are archived by date.
Giving up my Spider addiction cold turkey
21 Apr 2011 1 Comment
in Mental health and illness, Miscellaneous Musings Tags: computer game addiction, depression, dopamine, Julie Lomoe. Spider solitaire
It’s been barely an hour, and I’m already in the throes of withdrawal. My body’s tense, my muscles jumpy. My heart is racing, and I’m finding it hard to catch my breath. I’m feeling wired, with an unaccustomed energy that threatens to morph into a panic attack.
What’s the addiction I’m fighting? Is it booze, cigarettes? Maybe drugs, prescription or otherwise? No, it’s Spider solitaire. The spell it’s cast over me is relentless, and I’ve finally come to admit I’m powerless to resist. Just one game, I tell myself, or maybe twenty minutes. But inevitably, those minutes morph into hours – how many, I’m ashamed to admit. I could probably have cranked out a novel during the countless hours I’ve wasted on Spider in recent months. My blog has been one of the casualties; so has my housework, which is dubious at the best of times.
This toxic addiction mushroomed along with my depression, beginning last summer, and by now it’s hard to sort out cause and effect. Do I play too much Spider because I’m depressed, or am I depressed because I play too much Spider? Probably both. But when I’m playing, all sense of time fades away. I lapse into a state of suspended animation, on autopilot. As Pink Floyd would put it, I become comfortably numb – neither happy nor depressed, just vaguely anaesthetized. I’m capable of playing right through meal times, ignoring hunger, thirst, and urgent promptings from my bladder.
What’s going on here? In an effort to find out, I Googled “computer solitaire spider addiction” and came up with 864,000 hits. I was delighted to learn my blog post “Addicted to Spider solitaire?” from September 5, 2009 was fourth on the list. It contains my poem “Skinner’s Last Laugh” and you can find it in my archives.
Countless folks share my addiction. I read accounts by people with problems far worse than mine, some who played up to ten hours straight, who missed work because they’d been playing till five a.m., or who played on the job till they were fired. All agreed that Spider is powerfully addictive, perhaps more so than any other computer game, but for the most part, they couldn’t explain why. One woman had a valid excuse for guilt-free playing – she’s 74 years old, immobilized and housebound, on oxygen 24/7. For her, the game may be a godsend. For the rest of us, not so much – one writer calls it “Satan’s spider game of death.”
Some say the neurotransmitter dopamine, which controls craving and anxiety, is the culprit. Joss Earl writes, “Some theories suggest that dopamine developed as a survival technique for siege-like situations. If a monkey is sitting in a tree with a lion prowling around below, then being patient is essential for survival. Dopamine calms down the monkey and allows him to outwait the lion. . . . almost by definition, addictive drugs are ones that raise dopamine levels.” Research has shown that computer games raise dopamine as well. Certainly Spider alleviates my own anxiety, but it damps down my motivation and enthusiasm as well, and I can no longer tolerate the waste.
So I’m going cold turkey, effective today. Since clicking on the Spider icon has become my automatic response as soon as I log onto the computer, and since I’ve proven time and again that there’s no such thing as “just one game,” I asked my husband to hide Spider deep within the innards of my computer so that I can’t find it. He’s not deleting it entirely – not yet – but he swears he’ll do so when and if I relapse.
He did the dastardly deed while I was watching the soap opera “One Life to Live,” another of my addictions. True, it consumes less than an hour a day, but it falls mid-afternoon during what would otherwise be my prime writing time, and I’m too technologically challenged to tape it. Soon I’ll be deprived of that guilty pleasure as well – ABC has announced plans to cancel the series in January, replacing it with a life-styles reality show. Sorry, but I’ll boycott the new show – my life’s too full of reality already.
So, assuming I don’t freak out, what will I do with all my newfound time and energy? Maybe I’ll finally get around to cleaning up last year’s dead detritus from my garden. And maybe I’ll even get back to writing.
Summer was a bummer, but I’m back
23 Sep 2010 23 Comments
in Art of Marketing, Art of Writing, Bipolar mood swings, Mental health and illness Tags: bipolar disorder, creative block, depression, Julie Lomoe, manic depression
It’s the first full day of autumn, an auspicious day for new beginnings, and for better or worse, I’m back on my blog, after a leave of absence that lasted virtually all summer. I’ve been mired in a deep depression that stole over me last May, robbing me of my motivation and self-confidence, convincing me that I no longer had anything worth writing about, much less anything people would care about enough to read. But with the coming of fall, I’ve resolved to write myself out of my doldrums.
Writing is an integral part of my identity, and the notion that my writing years might be behind me severely deepened my depression. I spent far too many beautiful summer days ensconced in my old Lazy Boy recliner, endlessly reading other authors’ novels. For the first time in ages, I bypassed the races at Saratoga.
The sorry state of my parched and weed-infested garden all too accurately mirrors my state of mind. Upstate New York’s been unusually dry this summer, with only half its normal rainfall over the past two months, and my imagination has been suffering a similar drought. In May and June, my posts grew less frequent, more downbeat. Afraid of becoming a Debbie Downer like the Saturday Night Live character, I made a deliberate decision to stop blogging, possibly forever.
I made a mistake. I missed the creative excitement that came with crafting a new post, the cameraderie of the online community, and I came to feel increasingly like a nebbishy nonentity. So I’m jumping back in, hoping it’s not too late.
Charles Burchfield
What brought on this dark night of the soul? Probably a combination of biochemical and psychosocial factors. I’ve written before about my bipolar diagnosis, but it’s been well controlled with medication, and over the past few years, my mood has been amazingly upbeat and sunny. Back in May, in the post titled “Depression – cloudy, cool and drizzly,” I said, “I’m a firm believer in the biochemical nature of manic depression, as some still prefer to call bipolar disorder, and I know medications work.” I had faith in my shrink’s ability to tweak my medications enough to banish my increasingly bleak moods, but I’ve undergone lots of tweaking in the months since then, and nothing seems to work.
What triggered my depression, I’ve come to believe, is an old-fashioned identity crisis. For years I’ve identified myself as a mystery writer, but the success I’ve dreamed of has eluded me. I’m proud of my two self-published novels, Mood Swing: The Bipolar Murders and Eldercide, but the sales have been less than stellar. I’d hoped that building an online identity through my blog would boost my readership, but I came to realize that impressive blog stats don’t necessarily mean lots of people will buy my books, and my track record isn’t likely to inspire an agent or editor to beat down my door any time soon.
Even so, I enjoy online schmoozing far more than marketing my books in person. My depression descended soon after a signing at a local independent book store. It was my first straight solo signing ever, with no talk, panel discussion or party to drum up interest. True, I sold a few books, but each sale took painstaking effort in teasing out the themes that would appeal to each reader. For some it was the regional locale, for others an interest in bipolar disorder or end-of-life issues, for still others an interest in mysteries pure and simple. I’m basically an introvert, and the expenditure of energy left me drained and exhausted, with the realization that I’m just not cut out to be a demon marketer. Never was, never will be.
But am I still a mystery writer? At the very least, I’m a woman who has written four mystery novels and published two of them, and that’s something to be proud of, or so I try to convince myself. Will I write another? The verdict’s still out on that one. But one thing’s for sure – I’m still a writer, and I need to write. My life literally depends on it.
Can I write my way out of this depression? Stay tuned to find out. Never fear, I’ll cover other subjects as well, but I plan to post at least twice a week. And if you’ve read this far, please leave a comment – I know my readership has dwindled during this hiatus, but I need to know you’re out there.
World Elder Abuse Day – a cause near to my heart
15 Jun 2010 7 Comments
in Funeral Consumers Alliance, Mental health and illness, Miscellaneous Musings, Social Action Tags: Dear Abby, elder abuse, Elder Abuse and Neglect, Eldercide, Julie Lomoe, National Center on Elder Abuse, World Elder Abuse Day
Reading Dear Abby this morning, I learned that today, June 15, is World Elder Abuse Day. It’s a subject close to my heart. As President of my own licensed home care services agency, ElderSource, Inc., I witnessed the extreme pressures that can lead to potentially abusive situations, even among loving families who are doing their best to provide quality care for their elders.* Unfortunately, most seniors are not nearly as well off as our clients were.
The National Center on Elder Abuse estimates that as many as one in ten elders experience some form of abuse, but only one in five cases gets reported. They define elder abuse as “neglect, exploitation or ‘painful or harmful’ mistreatment of anyone 65 or older,” and the abuse can be financial, physical or psychological.
We’ve all heard the horror stories that surface regularly in the news – the abusive caregivers, the financial scams that can cost gullible elders their homes. Perhaps less obvious is the neglect that can stem from isolation, especially when dementia, mental illness or substance abuse are involved. Elders living alone, far from involved family, can suffer from self-neglect when they’re unable or unwilling to care for their own needs.
My 81-year-old brother in the Bronx has a wonderful support network of neighbors he’s come to know over 30 years in the same apartment building, but suburban neighborhoods of single-family dwellings don’t offer the same comfortable familiarity. Personally, I plan to age in place – our home is already too small for all our stuff, and I can’t picture downsizing any further. But it’s not a prospect I look forward to with great enthusiasm, and it’s all too easy to envision myself as a neglected recluse in some not so distant future.
What can you do to help prevent elder abuse, including self-neglect? First, learn more about how to recognize the signs and symptoms by visiting informative websites like the following:
Center of Excellence on Elder Abuse and Neglect, University of California at Irvine (www.centeronelderabuse.org)
National Center on Elder Abuse (http://www.ncea.aoa.gov/)
Keep in contact with your older friends, neighbors and relatives so as to help decrease isolation, a risk factor for mistreatment. Be observant for signs of abuse or neglect.
Report possible mistreatment or neglect to your local adult protective services agency or to 911.
Contact your local Area Agency on Aging office to help identify possible sources of support like Meals on Wheels.
Volunteer, either formally or informally. With elderly neighbors living on either side of us, my husband and I drove them to doctors’ appointments and ran errands. I’m grateful for the stories they told me and the closeness we developed near the ends of their life spans, and I hope my own younger neighbors may reciprocate someday. More formally, as administrator for the Memorial Society of the Hudson-Mohawk Region, I help educate people about affordable funerals and how to avoid one of the most common financial rip-offs that plague our seniors.
But why get involved in yet another cause, when there are so many clamoring for our attention? Because we’re all part of a beloved community, both globally and locally, and the person who needs your help may be as close as your next-door neighbor.
*My experience as President and CEO of ElderSource inspired my novel Eldercide, which addresses the question, “When quality of life declines with age and illness, who decides if you’re better off dead?” The book explores elder abuse taken to the extreme, but fortunately it’s pure fiction – at least from my perspective. Unfortunately, the plot is all too plausible. You can read more about Eldercide on this site.
Depression – forecast cloudy, cool and drizzly?
19 May 2010 8 Comments
in Bipolar mood swings, Mental health and illness, Miscellaneous Musings Tags: antidepressants, bipolar disorder, depression, Julie Lomoe, manic depression, Mood Swing: The BIpolar Murders, Peter Pan, Tinker Bell
Weather report from the dreary Northeast: cloudy, cool and gray with intermittent drizzles – a lot like the weather inside my head the past few days. Outside, they’re predicting a positive change, and tomorrow’s forecast promises a perfect spring day, sunny with temps in the seventies. I wish my mental state would brighten too, but I’m not at all sure.
I’ve written here before about my bipolar diagnosis, but from the perspective of someone who has it well under control with medication. Over the past several years, my disposition has been amazingly, predictably sunny. Now that depression is rolling in like low cloud cover and fogging my brain, my impulse is to hide, to retreat into silence. Who wants to read a blog that’s basically a downer? Maybe you’ll read it and never return. If I can’t say something nice and cheery, better not to say anything at all, right?
Wrong. I’ve always been big on self-disclosure in this blog, and it would feel hypocritical to change now, so I’ve decided to go public with these feelings of depression. My novel Mood Swing: The Bipolar Murders is all about transcending the stigma of mental illness, and sharing feelings is one way to go about it. The book’s protagonist Erika Norgren reveals her bipolar diagnosis on the 11 o’clock news, and when the book was published, I came out of the closet as well, to my enormous relief. I’m hoping that sharing my feelings here will have an equally therapeutic effect.
I’m a firm believer in the biochemical nature of manic depression, as some still prefer to call bipolar disorder, and I know medications work. A couple of months ago, my shrink tweaked my meds, changing one of them to something less apt to promote weight gain, but in retrospect, maybe that was a mistake. Yesterday, after taking to my bed for the afternoon, I was alarmed enough to call him, and I’ll be seeing him soon, but he wants me to monitor my moods a little while longer rather than changing the meds too abruptly.
I could launch into a whole laundry list of things to be depressed about, but realistically, I have far more things to be grateful for. This kind of depression isn’t about rationality, though – that’s what’s so frightening about it. Images of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico come to mind – the toxic black muck keeps pouring up unstoppably from the depths.
Never fear, I have no intention of dragging you into my slough of despond on a regular basis. There’ll be cheerier postings in the days and weeks ahead, but I may occasionally offer progress reports on my mental status. Meanwhile, I feel like Tinker Bell in Peter Pan – my inspiration is flickering, and I don’t want it to die out. If you believe, it would be good to hear some applause right about now.
Agita – agitation, acid stomach, or both?
02 Apr 2010 4 Comments
in Art of Writing, Mental health and illness, Miscellaneous Musings, Transcending technophobia Tags: agita, computer anxiety, Julie Lomoe, Merriam-Webster, research, technophobia
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
In my post about website design anxiety, I really wanted to use what I thought was a Yiddish idiom to convey the sense of gut-wrenching agitation the challenge invokes in me, but the word escaped me. It turns out AGITA is the word I wanted, and my search brings up a few thoughts about the internet, Merriam-Webster, and the changing nature of research.
First, thanks to my friend and Nia instructor Richele Corbo for answering the question when I posed it on Facebook. (I also ended the last post with my query, but no one’s come up with the answer here.) “Aggitah!!” Richele wrote. I’d tried adgena, agina and other similar combinations, and consulted lists of Yiddish idioms to no avail, but no wonder I couldn’t find it – it’s of southern Italian origin.
Playing around with the spelling, I tried my huge old Webster’s Unabridged without success, but I finally found “agita” on Google. One definition came from a medical site:
Agita: heartburn, acid indigestion, an upset stomach or by extension, a general feeling of upset. Italian American slang, from Italian “agitare” meaning “to agitate.”
The online Merriam-Webster’s had the word as well, along with the date 1982, suggesting this was when the word was added. They even had an aural application giving the correct pronunciation aloud.
Agita: S. Italian dial. pron. of Italian acido, literally heartburn, acid from Latin acidus, therefore a feeling of agitation or anxiety.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
So one source claims the word is rooted in agitation, the other in acid. But both agree on the confluence of anxiety and indigestion as well as the Italian origin. It took Richele, who’s of Jewish origin but married into an Italian family, to come up with the link I needed. Here I could wax rhapsodic about our wonderful American melting pot and how it’s enriched our language, but I’d rather focus on the word itself, and how I can now use it with confidence to describe that physical and psychological state that arises from too many hours spent trying to decipher new computer programs. (If you want a fair facsimile, try overdosing on caffeine or trying the wrong antidepressant. Or, come to think of it, those pharmaceuticals I experimented with back in the sixties – but we won’t go there.)
My exploration of agita also reinforces what my husband always says when we try unsuccessfully to prune our book collection: there’s no need to hang onto outdated research materials, because it’s easier to find what you want on line, and the paper versions simply clutter up the house. But does this mean we’ll throw out our entire collection of dictionaries and reference books? I wouldn’t bet on it.
How about you? Do you suffer from agita? And have you been pruning your collection of old-fashioned printed reference materials? Or do you think that’s meshugana?
When you’re feeling creative, how crazy is too crazy?
26 Feb 2010 10 Comments
in Art of Writing, Bipolar mood swings, Creativity, Mental health and illness Tags: bipolar disorder, Blog Book Tours, Bud Powell, Helen Ginger, Julie Lomoe, manic depression, Milwaukee Journal, Vincent Van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, Wallace Lomoe, Zoloft
Bud Powell at Birdland
Since early adolescence, I’ve been fascinated by the fine line between creativity and madness, and the life stories of artists and writers who suffered from mental illness. At 13, when I took up painting and jazz piano, I was intrigued to learn the great bebop pianist Bud Powell was schizophrenic. I barely knew what the word meant, but it sounded romantic, and I thought his illness contributed to the brilliance of his intense, driven style in compositions like “Un Poco Loco.”
When it comes to artistic creativity, is being “a little crazy” an asset or a 
liability? The question has been the subject of endless speculation. Would Van Gogh have been as great if he’d been totally sane? What about Robert Schumann or Virginia Woolf? I’m not sure, but in my own case, being a bit over the top has probably helped. At any rate, my experiences with bipolar disorder inspired my first novel, Mood Swing: The Bipolar Murders.
I came by the diagnosis atypically late, in my early 50’s. I was running ElderSource, Inc., a Licensed Home Care Services Agency, and the work was unbelievably stressful. A shrink prescribed Zoloft, and the effect was amazing. Within a couple of weeks, I felt better than I had in years, ready to take on the world. A few more weeks, and I totally flipped.
Virginia Woolf
It began harmlessly enough. I spent more and more time in my office behind closed doors, writing on my computer. My mind was flooded with inspirations I simply had to get down on paper before they escaped. What’s wrong with that, you ask? Nothing, if you’re a writer – but I was supposed to be running an agency. My memos got longer and longer, then turned into voluminous essays, including one about my father’s brilliance as Managing Editor of the Milwaukee Journal during the McCarthy era. Staff in the office were worried, but I blew them off – I’d never felt better, and I knew what I was writing was of supreme importance.
In early December, I devised a plan to revitalize the economy of the Hudson Valley through a multimedia art show which I would carry out with the assistance of the President of Bard College, Robert Rauschenberg (my favorite artist), and various other luminaries. Soon I was on the phone to Bard, trying to schedule an appointment. I locked myself into my office long past midnight, called the New York Times, and tried to convince some lone reporter on the night shift that they should run a front-page story about my plans, my father and his achievements. A sympathetic listener, he diplomatically suggested that my story might be better suited to the Milwaukee Journal. When I called the police rather than let my husband into the office, things were way over the top.
I narrowly escaped hospitalization. Somehow my husband got me to the shrink, who prescribed heavy medications to tamp down what I came to understand was an acute manic episode. I spent a week at home, prone on the sofa catching up on sleep and watching endless videos, waiting for the lithium to kick in. (I remember especially loving a documentary on Sting, U-2’s “Rattle and Hum” concert, and Robert Downey Jr. as Charlie Chaplin.) Within two weeks, I was back running ElderSource, but on a new medication regimen and with a newly heightened awareness of just how fragile mental health can be.
Was I manic depressive all along? I don’t know, but I’ve now got an official diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder I, and I’ll probably be on medications for the rest of my life, although the dosage is minimal now. Fortunately, being bipolar seems to be trendy. When I talk about my mystery novel Mood Swing: The Bipolar Murders at panels and signings, people from the audience invariably approach me to confide that they or close friends or family members are bipolar. But too often they tell me they’ve kept the information secret for fear of repercussions from the stigma that still surrounds mental illness.
So is being “un poco loco” good for creativity? Maybe, when it’s under control. These days, that control is possible through advances in psychopharmacology. Hypomania – the state of mind that falls just short of full-blown mania – can be a wonderfully productive state for writers. But if you find yourself locking out your husband and calling the police, it might be time to call a shrink instead, and see about getting onto some new meds.
*This post originally appeared on Helen Ginger’s wonderful blog, Straight from Hel, on Friday the 13th, November 2009, as part of my first Blog Book Tour.
**This beautiful photo of Bud Powell rehearsing at Birdland in 1958 was taken by Francis Wolff. I heard and met Bud on just one occasion, when we were introduced by Max Roach, around this same period. Sadly, his mind and his playing had deteriorated by this point. His only coherent statement was a plea to my mother – “Buy me a Ballantine’s.”
Down with hoarding – in praise of my gorgeous new garbage bin
16 Feb 2010 10 Comments
in Mental health and illness, Miscellaneous Musings Tags: A&E Hoarders, clutter, cluttering, DSM-IV, hoarding, Julie Lomoe
Am I truly a hoarder? My Significant Other would say so, but I’m not nearly as bad as those folks on A&E’s show Hoarders, which I watch almost as religiously as Project Runway. Hoarders defines hoarding as a mental disorder, but the official verdict’s still out. The boundary between run-of-the-mill cluttering and obsessive-compulsive hoarding isn’t glaringly obvious, either. I could easily imagine myself falling into the predicament of those folks on the show who haven’t been able to sleep in their beds for years because the clothing is piled too high and the beds now belong to the cats.
But perhaps there’s still hope for me. Last week when County Waste, my garbage collecting company, delivered a totally unexpected new black bin with a Kelly green cover, I was positively ecstatic. Were I a true hoarder, the idea of having two big garbage bins rather than one, and thus doubling the amount of trash I could toss each week, would have provoked an acute anxiety attack rather than enthusiastic ambition.
Evidently the garbage company was equally excited, because they glued not one but two lavishly illustrated, full-color promotional fliers atop the lid. One read in part:
Ride the wave to the future of recycling with County Waste!
It’s here! Weekly single stream recycling
AND with your brand new recycling cart!
Now, instead of the old newspaper recycling basket, I’ve got an enormous new bin that will hold the equivalent of four banker’s boxes of paper. They’ll pick it up weekly, along with its grubby old twin, which can now be devoted exclusively to Styrofoam, rotten food from the fridge, yard waste and other unrecyclable trash.
At last I can empty my files, throw out all those old manuscript drafts, all the sample chapters returned in those dreaded self-addressed manila envelopes. The list of acceptable items reads like a laundry list of all the stuff that’s been cluttering my house for years: Computer, FAX and copy paper, magazines and catalogs, newspaper, notebook paper, soft covered workbooks, paperback books, junk mail, and on and on. I can throw glass and plastic bottles in the same bin, along with frozen food containers – in short, practically everything I used to relegate to the regular garbage.
A week has gone by, and tonight is garbage night. I checked the pretty new bin today, and it was still two-thirds empty. What happened to all my fine new decluttering resolutions? As usual, I got sidetracked by any number of activities with higher priorities or greater potential for pleasure.
So am I a hoarder? That depends on how you define the term. I checked my trusty DSM-IV, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, and to my surprise, hoarding wasn’t even in the index. A little Google research led me to the Mayo Clinic’s site, which defines hoarding as “the excessive collection of items, along with the inability to discard them.” That’s me, for sure. Compulsive hoarding syndrome can be a symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but it’s not considered a distinct mental health problem in its own right.
Not yet, anyway. The fifth edition of the DSM, to be published in 2013, will include hoarding as an official psychiatric diagnosis. The rationale, according to The Wall Street Journal: “Hoarding can lead to significant distress, and including it in the DSM is expected to increase public awareness and stimulate diagnosis and research into the disorder.” Additionally, of course, the new diagnosis will have its very own code number, so insurance will pay for therapy sessions to cope with cluttering. I’m sure we’ll see a burgeoning population of decluttering specialists among mental health professionals. You can already watch some of them at work every Monday night at 10 p.m., coaching those hapless hoarders in their painful efforts to let go of the trash that’s smothering them.
I thought the subject of my gorgeous new trash bin would make a nice tidy little post, but clutter plays such a major – and villainous – role in my life that it deserves a three-part series. So stay tuned for the next installments. Part II will feature more general ruminations, and Part III will deal with the paper clutter that afflicts writers in particular.
How would you diagnose your own relationship to all that stuff in your life? Do you suffer from benign cluttering habits, or malignant hoarding? I’d love to hear from you.
