A while back, a friend shared this article on Facebook and I couldn’t not share it here. I’m currently in the process of going through everything I own in preparation to move house and so I’m coming across a lot of things that I have previously loved. I’m being constantly faced with the decision to hold onto something or to let it go. So I resonated with this piece very strongly.

I thoroughly recommend reading it but here’s a summary. The author describes feeling sympathy for inanimate objects, from “the guitar that doesn’t get played anymore” to “the once loved camera that has now been displaced by a newer one.” And the thought of an object being discarded causes great anxiety and sadness.

I’ve struggled with this all my life. As a child, all my toys had personalities and thoughts and emotions but that hasn’t faded as I’ve grown up even though I no longer play with them. They’re all still in my cupboard, neatly stored in boxes and bags. I feel guilty about that, that it must be uncomfortable and claustrophobic, but it’s better than throwing them away. That would be the ultimate betrayal. Imagining them in a bin or landfill fills me with such overwhelming anxiety and guilt that I can’t think properly. But it’s not just toys; it’s everything. I have a draw full of my old phones (how can I go from carrying them around twenty four seven to throwing them away?), a box of broken Christmas ornaments (it would be so callous to throw them out just because they’re not perfect anymore), my old school jumper, and so on and so on and so on.

Throwing things away is hard for me. I have this anxiety about letting things go, like I’ll lose parts of myself. Anything that has some meaning to me, I have to keep. It’s similar to how I write everything down and take a million photos. It goes with my difficulties around identity, a big part of BPD, and feeling like I have no idea who I really am. So I’m probably assigning aspects of my identity to physical objects in response to that. It certainly doesn’t help with all of this. And I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a link to the difficulty I have in managing the strength of my emotions. I’ve talked about this before: how strongly I feel emotions and how I sometimes feel other people’s emotions. I’d always assumed that it was another facet of that.

The article discusses some other potential causes:

“There is some evidence to suggest that OCD and Synaesthesia are possible causes. Put simply, Synaesthesia is a neurological condition where the senses are confused. So someone with it, may smell a taste, or see a particular colour when thinking of a specific number. Some people have a form of Synaesthesia known as Personification. This is when a personality or emotion is attributed to an object. It would appear that there is a higher tendency for those on the autistic spectrum to have Synaesthesia in one form or another.”

The link to Synaesthesia is an interesting one. I do have some Synaesthesia-like experiences: with some sounds, I experience specific tastes or sounds. The sound of 7 chords leaves a metallic taste in my mouth so strong that I avoid those chords as much as possible and working on the production of my songs can be a bit of a minefield: high frequencies, like cymbals, are yellow while lower frequencies are dark colours (different depending on the instrument) and the colours in the song need to be balanced for me to be happy with them. It’s hard work and often leaves me with a debilitating headache.

I don’t know what the answer is or whether there is one. But I think the more we talk about this stuff and the more normal it becomes, the less we struggle against it. That takes up so much energy and emotion when living with these things is hard enough. That’s kind of why I started writing all of this stuff down, to feel less alone and hopefully make other people feel less alone too.

(Left: me and my toys when I was about eleven. Right: confetti that I kept from an amazing concert.)