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Buying Happy and Anxiety

Packing up a house is tough enough but it was even tougher for us because we had accumulated a lot of crap. Let me go back a ways here:

Since 2006 I had been collecting things, I wouldn't say hoarding per say but I would buy things to make myself happy. We were renting when we were younger before we bought a house and those are times we could have been saving money, but there I was out of a job, feeling depressed and anxious and I felt the only way to keep myself afloat was to buy my way to happiness. So I bought and bought and bought, and I got a high off of it, there were times when I saw something on Ebay and I just had to have it, meanwhile I'm spending my savings like crazy and I'm not getting happier just poorer.

In addition to being "buy happy", I had developed horrible anxiety, I had anxiety when I was a kid but it got a lot worse after I got fired from my job. I just didn't want to go outside anymore. I would have my husband, who was working all day, get us groceries or get stuff from the store. I spent a lot of time in the apartment and less time out in the world. I locked myself up and away from people and I didn't go anywhere unless I had an appointment to be somewhere. All family events and trips to the store were accomplished only with the company of my husband. He of course was getting annoyed, because he had more of an outgoing demeanor about him and didn't understand what anxiety was.

So when it came to packing I had to put myself into a zen moment and really think about what I could let go. Have you ever seen an episode of Hoarders? How hard it is for them to get rid of their things because they have such an attachment to everything they own, even though they haven't touched it in months or years? That was me, I got that red in the face, I'm in trouble feeling as I tried to sift through all the stuff we had accumulated over these years, as if something bad was gonna happen if I let it go.
I cleared the house out and purged a lot of things. It was hard, I had grown attachments to things I didn't even use. It took a while but I eventually had a traditional yard sale and sold $100 worth of stuff and I had a non-traditional yard sale on FB and sold $350 worth of stuff (seems to be the way to go these days). When the first wave of clean up was done the house looked a lot cleaner, brighter, and less cluttered and I started to feel better just getting rid of it all.
This was only Phase 1 of cleaning, others were to follow but we were on our way to putting our house on the market.


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