The Blog of Many Things

Also, since most girls avoid physical contact with men they’re not related to, please do not hug them, but rather shoo the offender away if you can, or at least escort the girl to a safe place. You can still offer words of encouragement and support. Furthermore, understand that the victim may not be very welcoming towards you because she’ll obviously be shaken, and won’t know where you are coming from. If that’s the case, please still give her something to cover herself (hijab is very important, think of it as someone ripping your shirt off) and stand some distance away until you are sure she’s in safe hands.

When I say life as a hoarder please don’t get the wrong idea. I don’t mean a house filled wall to ceiling with a bunch of stuff with a barely visible path through the house. I mean a little girl who found value in every small little thing. A little girl who kept every single card she ever got. A little girl who turned 18 and is having to pack her room up to go to college in a month. That little girl is me.

Packing has been no easy task, in fact I have been at it for nearly two months yet somehow I am still not finished. It’s hard to pack because I honestly don’t know how to. I have lived my life throwing things in places that perhaps my mother wouldn’t find it and get rid of it because although it was useless in her eyes it was something valuable to me at one point in time.

You find things that you never even knew you had and sometimes that is both a blessing and a curse. You find cards from your now recently deceased step grandfather who was very strange but he still loved you even though you were not his blood grandkid to love and you wish that maybe you had talked to him a little bit more than you did. You find cards from your grandmother and grandfather who seem to write a novel in every single card that they give you and when you were younger it was annoying because you didn’t really want to read it because it was to much and you had more important things to do but you sat down and read it anyways. Now you see those same grandparents maybe a couple of days out of the year if you are lucky. You find a card from one of your former friends who left this world way earlier than she should have because of cancer and in fact you find cards from people who used to be good friends of yours and now you can barely remember who they are. Cards from people who you called your best friend and now you haven’t spoken a word to each other in years except maybe a happy birthday message even though you have each other on all forms of social media. Or maybe you find a necklace from your kindergarten boyfriend back when life was easy and your heart wasn’t broken but perhaps you were breaking hearts if that’s possible in kindergarten.

Perhaps you would find multiple cameras. Not ones that you can access because chances are they’ve been dead for nearly ten years but you’re sure that when you had them you had a great time because that’s what you do when you are a little girl.

In the room of a hoarder you might find memories of a past life, memories of how that person used to be. Little girls grow up to be women and those women have memories so before you go and tell someone that what they find important is not important maybe listen to their story. Let people reminisce because giving up on things you once valued is not easy. Let them tell you the story about how they used to play games with their little sister and then they grew up and stopped talking to her as much because two years is such a big age gap and even though she is two years younger you feel you are too old for her. Let them tell you about how they used to visit their dad every summer and saw those grandparents every day of the summer and how each summer the visit gets shorter and shorter until you’re spending two days with the man who helped give you life.

But also let me tell you this. You are not to old too play games with your sister because one day you will both grow up and you will go to college and she will get involved in boy drama and just maybe if you had payed more attention to her she wouldn’t be after attention from others

Let me tell you that friendships don’t always last and you will loose plenty of people in your life. But let me say I’m still going to keep all of those cards I’ve gotten because one day when I’m moving into my own place I’ll look back on these cards and have these same memories. Because even though I have hoarded many useless things I will always find value in the cards because one day the person who sent them might not be around.