Tasha: hoarding, hyperlogicality, and argument

Tasha is my best friend. I know her real age and the name she was given before Tasha. I think I’m the only one she has given these pieces of information to. Others have taken them by force: nurses and hotel watchmen. But I’m the only one she has given them to. It’s an honor, and one I don’t seek to disparage here.

But I will talk about something she wouldn’t like. I’ll force the term “hoarder” onto her. I was a hoarder; I may be again some day. She hates the term. It makes her sound crazy, I think. But I understand that hoarding is anything but crazy.

Obsessive compulsive people are trapped in a hyperlogical mindset. They’ve lost the forest for the trees. They get stuck on the details. They are quintessential bad retards because while their behaviour may be crazy, their thinking is far from it.

I remember when I was on neurosurgery, I was doing a day on deep-brain stimulation clinic. This is where they assess patients to see if implanting an electronic buzzer into their brain tissue will help with a number of conditions. I specifically remember a young orthodox Jew, brought in by his parents, because he was so obsessive compulsive he couldn’t function. I can’t remember his specific problems, but I do remember his interactions with the surgeon.

The surgeon, a very action-oriented guy, went crazy trying to discuss the procedure with the young man. He couldn’t say a word without the young man fixating on an “irrelevant” part of it and beating the issue to death.

I had the same interaction with the high-level manager brought in to deal with me and my bad retard behaviour. His mistake was thinking that because my behaviour was crazy, I was crazy. That I didn’t have logic on my side. He accused me of stealing a monitor I was using to test out my computer. When I said “borrow” he said he didn’t want to mince words, but he insisted on using the word “stole.” When I raised that they discovered the monitor during a fire alarm test, not a room inspection, he said it didn’t matter. When I said the branches on my roof were suspended from the light, not the fire alarm, and that they didn’t interfere with the alarm’s operation, he said it didn’t matter. The problem was that I had crazily put branches on the roof, not their interference. He wanted me to yield to his power, and his “mental health”, but he assumed that that meant argument was on his side.

Now Tasha is in the same mess. They tell her she has too much stuff, but they can’t tell her how much is too much. They can’t tell her which of her objects is trash and which is treasure, because these are normative categories, and they can’t define the criteria they are using. All they can say is that her behaviour is crazy, and it has to change.

Tasha denies this as a hurdle, but the biggest obstacle I had to clearing my hoard was an inability to prioritize my objects. They had all come from the trash, so that wasn’t a useful distinction, and I could use them all, so that couldn’t distinguish either. I got stuck in these prioritization logic traps: this pair of pants fit better, but this pair of pants was cleaner. Which one was superior to the other depended on the circumstance. The traps compounded when raised to the level of ensembles: this piece was individually better, but it had no outfit that it worked in. How can I get rid of something that was too crappy to keep but too good to throw away.

My understanding manifested in a paradox (as so much of my psychotic reasoning did): hoarding is not about having too much stuff, it’s about having too little. If I had had one pair of good pants, I could have kept those and thrown out the ten pairs of bad ones that I had. But I didn’t have one good pair. I had to keep collecting bad stuff in order to find the good stuff that would denecessitate the bad stuff.

Tasha is stuck in a similar valuation problem. Each article of clothing she has has value as a piece of clothes. But it has a cost as a space-occupying piece of stuff. She’s comparing apples and oranges. It’s a ratio of sunbeams to unicorns. Until she can translate the costs and benefits of each thing into a common currency, she can’t compare them.

I’m worried she doesn’t have the time or capability to figure it out. My building is really haphazard when doling out discipline. They can’t find the balance between the light touch and the heavy hand – my case was escalated to upper management before I had even received written notice or lower management. Tasha has received dozens of “final” notices, and someday, maybe soon, one of them will be terminally final and no warning will be given. But until then, her hyperlogicality will fend them off.