Picture a hoarder’s paradise. When volunteering at an elderly woman’s home to clean the place up after years and years of neglect, you see certain things that you can only imagine a person would actually do to their home. Cigarette buds literally everywhere, cardboard boxes stacked to the roof filled with some of the most odd things, things that make you wonder why anyone would actually want to keep 20 fast food receipts from 5 years ago. Her living room felt like the deep crevices of a cave that hadn’t been explored for centuries. The shattered remains of old plates, a broken microwave in the corner sharing a box with a broken blender. Just scratching the surface of this home made me wonder just how somebody could live here for more than a week. As me and the rest of the team of volunteers traversed every room wondering if these gloves we had on were enough protection, enough plastic bags to pollute the ocean for 100 people alone, more empty soda cans than I could count, dirty clothes thrown all over the place, I had never seen anything like it. 

I couldn’t help but wonder why anyone would live like this. Was it laziness? Did the homeowner want to keep her house extra cozy by leaving mountains of garbage all over her house to the point where she can’t ever not be cozy? Maybe it was something deeper that only fellow hoarders all collectively understood. God only knows. This was a lifestyle that made me feel sick. It feels wrong to judge people when volunteering to help them but when you see cockroaches scurry out of probably the dirtiest bathtub I’ve ever seen before, it’s a bit hard not to. 

“For this room everyone, put masks over your mouths.”

    This made my eyebrows rise higher than anything else I had seen all day. We entered her guest room, it was like walking into a neat freaks hell. It smelled like somebody had died there, mold all over, who knows what else. Seeing how worn down this house was really made me think about procrastination. We all procrastinate at least a little but this was a different kind. In my head I had guessed that the owner just got too lazy to clean her house and kept on procrastinating until her house was a huge mess. Then it just got worse and worse until the result was what I had experienced on that volunteer trip. We procrastinate because, when we don’t want to do something we just keep putting it off and saying that we’re going to do it later until it never happens. The worst case scenarios are types of situations like these where everything just spirals out of control and eventually your house starts to look like it hasn’t been inhabited in years. It’s a tale as old as time and there’s only one way to beat it, motivation. The type of motivation that you experience from seeing a house like that will make anyone want to clean up a little.