Slowroll.

Sometimes getting older feels like a complimentary crash course in things you never wanted to understand. What it’s like to become seemingly blurrier to other people as a woman. How it feels to have losses accumulate at a higher and higher rate, like contractions before a birth. How you were wrong all of the times you clucked over other people’s misfortunes while vaguely assuming no such thing would ever happen to you—after all, you’re different. Special. Until you’re not.

Slowly at first, and then with alarming speed, you acquire the same wrinkles, the same sags, the same blue veins as every other old person you have looked at without focusing in enough to recognize your own reflection. You inherit some of the same sad stories, too. You let go of trivial worries, because now there are heavier ones to carry. Loves you once thought were fortresses turn out to be not so impenetrable. All of the mental safeguards that you constructed, all of the little protections for yourself that you carefully laid in over time, like tissue paper in a box, fail to prevent things from shattering. Again.

To top it all off, this is the best-case scenario.

Then again, you find yourself just slightly less prone to repeating old mistakes. That's one blessing. In spite of your best efforts, you have indeed learned a few things—some of those crash courses proved useful. Even if other people don't notice you so much, you're better at noticing yourself (though it's easier after you put your glasses on). You realize what's broken can come to seem beautiful. And when you look back, you see that every time you thought you might be done in, it was just another contraction. This time, when you get the wake-up call, you actually wake up. You understand that you’re not finished. Not quite yet.

Music: "Holding Back the Years"

"What Is Hoarding?"

My mom asked this question rhetorically one weekend as I sorted through a box containing, among other things, nearly every single birthday card I had ever received. You know, just the kind of chit-chat that comes up when contemplating a box that happens to contain blank stationery from 1982.

Let me start by saying that no home in my immediate family has ever been touched by the type of hoarding that deeply affects lives and makes for sordid television shows. I have known people with real hoarders in their families — my ex and one of my best friends among them —and it's not a joking matter. (Well actually, they have joked about it, but I can't. So let's move on.)

Those shows, and those examples, can convince an average person who hangs on to things too long that there's really nothing to address. The home has clear pathways and is not sanitation hazard. The home may also be your parents' home, where you do not live but where you store a few "keepsakes." So what if there are a few full boxes in the closets, and possibly a Naf Naf shirt from 1986? Nothing to see here, people! Fully functional, that's me. Oh, and by the way, I can't stand clutter. In my place.

My mom and I have both been (jokingly, sort of) accused of hoarding by other family members. What this tells me is that the condition is possibly hereditary, and therefore I bear little to no responsibility for whatever tendencies I display. (Right Mom?)

I'll admit that I wondered what would happen when she retired. Controlled chaos hid behind closed doors for many years: kitchen cabinets were crammed with towers of Tupperware and unmatched lids, not to mention a bunch of expired food; basement closets harbored untold amounts of clothing.

One of the first things she did upon retiring was to clean that stuff out.

I'll admit that surprised me a little. If I had just retired, maybe I'd just alternate going to the gym with lying around a lot, and get to the stuff behind closed doors later (not unlike what I do as an unretired person on weekends). But she was ON IT. Like, within the first week.

She says now that she didn't realize how stressed she was when she was working, and how much it prevented her from dealing with stuff like Glad containers, tomatoes from 2006 and seven-year-old walnut oil (left there by her daughter, UncMo).

It was relatively easy to deal with the kitchen stuff. The clothes were another matter. "Clothes are my identity," she said. I could not judge, knowing that I had a stash of Esprit, Firenza, Guess and other labels (hello Naf Naf) meant to preserve my '80s identity. It's hard to throw away clothes of any kind, much less clothes that are in perfectly good condition, much less clothes that still fit, convincing you that if you could just donned the right outfit, you just might be teleported right back to your younger bod in the '80s, yet suffused with the wisdom and self-possession of your later years. Too much to ask?

But the key problem for me was, and always has been, paper. I grew up in an era that required it, and I saved it all: the birthday cards, the birthday newspapers, the letters, the resumes, the pamphlets, the brochures, notebooks, diaries, journals, the letters, the resumes, the Playbills, the stickers, bank statements, phone bills, credit card statements, pay stubs, my first bylined stories, more letters—you get the idea. (The class picture below, on top of the Penn graduation pamphlet and the candy cigarettes, is Sir UncMo's. I have extended, as a courtesy, hoarding privileges to his past as well.)

This all fits in a bedroom closet at my parents' house, far away from my actual (sort of) neat abode. It even fits with the records and books of mine that my dad, lacking any hoarding projects of his own to tackle upon retirement, took it upon himself to box up and stow away. It fits, but I know it's all there. Now, when I visit my parents on weekends, I often make it a point to wade through one of the many closeted piles of paper. (Sometimes I make some discoveries, and sometimes, as above, I end up bringing a select number of things in shoeboxes to my own closet, pretending that I've dealt with them.)

When I was a kid, I saved candy and gum wrappers. So, if you can picture it, I had a dresser full of clothes, and in the bottom drawer, I had maybe two small boxes (one of them was definitely a Barbie box) crammed with one representative wrapper of every bit of candy or gum I had ever consumed. Bazooka, Dubble Bubble, candy corn, Reese's, et cetera.

To me then, it was basically a way of cataloging my love for sweets. It was my Evernote Food, expressed via one ridiculous collage of waxed, colored paper. I still remember, as a kid, opening the bottom drawer of my dresser and seeing all those wrappers pressed behind the cellophane window that was meant to display a Barbie, and feeling a mixture of satisfaction and shame. The satisfaction was for what a good job I had done of cataloging my consumption. The shame was from knowing, vaguely, that it was not "normal."

That's right! I know what you're thinking: Today, that 11-year-old would have pharmaceutical assistance. Too late, friends!

Flash forward about 10 years. I'm done with college. My parents came to graduation, ready to help me pack up. "I knew you were depressed when I saw your room," my mom said later. It was a corner room on the ground floor of a group house in West Philadelphia, bars on the window, with a loft bed, where I read Sylvia Plath a little too closely (who's depressed?). It wasn't that I had accumulated very much. It was more that the room was a mess, and I had not bothered to pack a thing, even though I knew I was leaving. And my mom was right. I was abjectly depressed. You can't see these things in the moment. You have to look at them later and realize that you were a frog in boiling water.

This is where the question of "what is hoarding" gets interesting, to me. Are you holding on to a past you can no longer revisit? Are you just too tired to deal with the accumulation of stuff? Or is it a combination of both? What is your physical environment telling you about the mental?

Either way, my view now, in no small part because of that college insight from my mom, is that your physical environment reflects your current state of mind. Are you accumulating clutter and disorganized, or are you neat and up-to-date? Are you editing your life, regularly, in every way, or are you getting sloppy? Conversely, is your space so sparse or tightly controlled that there is no room for imperfection or spontaneity?

Now, like my mom, I resort to organizing my oversupply of beauty products and giving away clothing when things start feeling hectic. But I still possess, at the top corner of my closet, a shoebox with candy cigarettes in it (those things keep!). And I may or may not have rescued some perfectly fine McCormick Italian Seasoning of undetermined vintage from my mom's kitchen cabinet. I don't save too much paper these days, but I do hoard digital conversations, including chats with Sir UncMo. I know that we are meant to live in the present, but I may never let go of my need to preserve the past. Especially when it involves people who mean a lot to me.

All I ever wanted to do by saving things was to hold on to my life, the life that is slipping away every single minute of every day, inexorably, which I've known ever since the day in third grade that elementary school let out for summer and I was the only kid who wasn't happy it was over, because I realized, with devastating certainty, that I would never have another year quite like that one, never be a child again, and didn't even comprehend yet that the days were numbered where someone would put pen to paper, just for me, leaving an envelope to be opened.

Music: "Smoke"

The Hour Is Striking.

Recently I came across some old copies of my high school's literary magazine.

My thought was the same as yours: poetry by teens. How embarrassing.

I knew I had a poem in there somewhere. It was terrible. Here's the first reason why: It was a "found poem." That's where you don't actually write anything yourself. You just string together things that other people wrote and call it your own. Here's the second reason: I found mine in Elle magazine. That's right. I took selections of the silly copy that filled a women's fashion magazine and strung it together to make a tapestry of bad puns and excessive alliteration.

Here's what I remember about high school creative writing class: I struggled to get a poem or story of any kind accepted for publication in Erehwon (you know, that's nowhere backwards); my teacher was one of the "cool" teachers who liked to wear a purple bandanna as a scarf and was either dating or worshiping the DC poet, teacher and publisher Richard Peabody, I can't remember which; we read a lot of Raymond Carver and once listened as a class to Jimi Hendrix's "Crosstown Traffic" to learn about metaphor; I was a good student and praised writer who somehow was not doing very well at writing creatively, at least in that milieu. I wanted to be doing better.

I had mixed feelings when that one poem got accepted into Erehwon because I knew it was by far my dumbest one, and that I had written other poems, real poems, and yet those were not good enough. You can witness the terribleness below:

Photo courtesy Deborah Wassertzug*

As I paged through the old copies, the names came flooding back of the students who always won the "awards" that a panel of adults would give to what they deemed the best pieces in the magazine. Those entries in the table of contents got an asterisk next to them. And you know, a lot of the writing wasn't bad for a bunch of precocious teenagers. Many of the bylines in that magazine belonged to people who later became magazine editors, published authors, independent writers.

I continued to study poetry, and to write poems, most of them appalling, but it was an outlet. It takes a supreme amount of talent and self-confidence to be a poet. Basically, you are assuming that you have such a masterful command of language that you will be able to paint the same picture that others paint with a far larger number of words, and do so without being melodramatic, obtuse, or ridiculous.

I have only ever met one ordinary person who wrote poetry and was actually a stunning poet. We worked together. He was a kind of rumpled, often funny copy editor. One day he came up to my desk while we were working a weekend news shift and said, "Want to hear a poem?"

"Sure," I said.

He proceeded to reel off, by heart, a poem he had written. I was prepared for a joke at best, a supremely awkward moment at worst. I was not prepared for the poem to take my breath away. It was not a poem for me, nor was it a particularly romantic one. It was just an exceedingly good piece of work.

"That was really good," I said, my mouth open.

"Thanks," he said, and ambled back to his desk. I subsequently developed a crush and dating interlude that was annoying and inconsequential, except that this person introduced me to Haruki Murakami and Frank O'Hara, which is very consequential.

Poetry can make you into a sucker.

In my thirties I tried to keep my love of poetry alive, but volumes sat like museum pieces, unread. I would cut out the odd New Yorker poem, but stopped trying to learn about the authors. Today I regularly focus long enough to get through an article in that magazine (no small task), but even skimming the poems feels like a chore. It seems, now, harder to spend extra time on just a few lines of text, when there are so many other short phrases to wade through on Twitter, Facebook and the rest of the Internets that yield their meanings so easily and cheaply.

I never found my found poem in those three unearthed copies of Erehwon (Deborah later did, above). After staring at them for awhile, I put them into the recycling.

Then the next day I came across a poem in Yoga International of all places, a magazine I happened to buy at a Houston newsstand while killing time on business trip.

The Hour Is Striking

The hour is striking so close above me,
so clear and sharp,
that all my senses ring with it.
I feel it now; there's a power in me
to grasp and give shape to my world.

I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
and they come toward me, to meet and be met.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

Maybe it is not time, after all, to put away poetry for good.

Audio: "Having a Coke With You"

* Erehwon PTSA Award winner