Emotional Packrats Anonymous

Hello. My name is Atticus…

Hi, Atticus.

… and I am an emotional packrat.

When did I know? The dozen or so storage bins filled to the brim with possessions baring little worth or practicality should have been my first clue. Instead it was a confluence of self-realizations, the first of which was that I am not a hoarder. I don’t keep garbage in foresight of potential usefulness. My collection has one extrinsic value: to help me remember.

I realized early on my memory was broken. Even before my partying phase I frequently forgot names and numbers, boiling everything I learned down to paraphrases since I failed to recall any quotes verbatim. What politicians consider straight talk I defined in my formative years as creative explanation, constantly taking artistic license because I understood the theories but for the life of me could not remember the words.

Retention grew more and more difficult as years passed, which became frustration, then embarrassment, and finally a full-fledged complex. During this transition I acquired habits that leveled my forgetfulness, the most prominent being an obsession with photography, but hidden behind the walls was a growing collection of all thing Atticus. A Museum of Modern Winston, if you will.

You see, this complex was not merely a learning disability. It was a herpetic cancer consuming moments that should have been calming for me, like the seconds before drifting into peaceful sleep. Hundreds, maybe thousands of nights laying in darkness, unwaveringly convinced I will soon forget everyone and everything I have ever known, increasingly more paranoid each time of what I have already forgotten. Prolonged exposure to foreboding does strange things to a man.

The first effect of this madness was my aforementioned photography lust. I am often intent on trapping time, rendering a split second eternally to 5x7 purgatory. A single glance can fast track me to the nooks of my brain where memories hide. It may seem trite since most folks do this to remember a day on the beach or a vacation. When I do so it is to recall where I have been, who I know and what it is I want to do.

The anxiety was compounded with pressures of perishable information such as appointments, homework and promises. More stress was added for meaningless data, like anniversaries and birthdays. It takes brass ones to admit to a woman you don’t remember what she was wearing when you first met or what song was playing when you first kissed. As deeply as we believe in honesty it only ever results in disquiet.

The most recent incarnation has been my engagement with social networking. The rush I received recalling a one night stand from a stranger’s perfume is now multiplied by thousands with the click of a mouse. This is my drug in its purest form; everyone I have ever known stapled digitally to my hip, histories documented, futures tracked and notated in real-time, never missing a moment of anyone’s life anywhere.

But like all good drugs the side effects are never as advertised.

I knew I had a problem when what began as the preservation of physical items with attachments became a 24/7 infatuation with the online warehouse storing my mental menagerie. My time was spent collecting, scrapbooking memories instead of making them. I collected everyone I knew, like a house overrun with cats someone accumulated to the point of infestation. Obsessively hunting and gathering persons in volumes which I could never properly care for.

By the time I realized my neurosis the friends and trinkets had piled higher than I could see. This was my perfect creation, a monster of faces and time glued hastily together by irrational fear. Before me was a complex and impenetrable database of my life, an inhalable timeline to relieve the anxiety of losing touch with who I am and where I came from.

That’s why I stand here before you today admitting I am an emotional packrat. I finally get it. This is bigger than severing thick ties to novelties purchased at Niagara Falls in 1987.

It’s about letting go, a fundamental I have failed at my entire life. There is a long war ahead but I have strong will and nothing but time.

Good first meeting. Thanks for the cigarettes and coffee. Same time next week?