this, all this, is the exhaust fan to my accumulation angst
accumulating just as much as throwing away gives me deep anxiety   it’s a physical thing, like in my chest somewhere to which object making is the exit door 
it reduces the weigh of things in the balance of my mind
 
i am part of a long lineage of hoarders
my mother keeps trying to give me stuff - it’s hard to describe what exactly the range is so wide; i confess i get incredibly irritated at points - doesn’t she realise this feeds into my own insanity?
i snapped at her    ‘fuck common you can’t just ask me if i want this or that every two seconds do you know how hard it is for me to say no?’
i saw real sadness pass through her eyes, ever so quickly, only i could have known      ‘you know how hard for me it is to give any of this away’
 
i felt sorry for myself - not for her - that i had been so insensitive to a hurt i know well
 
what irritates me in her intrusions into my hoarder’s orbit is then not so much to have the choice of more shit to accumulate - everyday the whole world spreads out its unlimited buffet of crap before my eyes - but rather, to see myself so clearly in her, a mirror to my gait, my face, my obsessions 
and truth is, mostly everything she gives me ends up in a sculpture or hung somewhere in my 27 sqm home - in a place of choice, that i cherish 
 
and then i build the angst back up in a new shape, messy at first, more and more defined until i get the feeling, “however brief or illusory”, as maggie nelson would have it, that by making these objects i’m “in fact incinerating layers of crap rather than tossing more of it onto the landfill”