I know, all your life, you saved things people called junk.
Cans, cartons, empty bottles, etc. You kept them as if they were seeds for a future you couldn’t see yet.
Sometimes an opportunity presents itself, other times it doesn’t, and the only way you get rid of them is when you need to move to a new place.
Moving all over the place trying to reach the place of your dreams made it nearly impossible to keep those stacks of perceived useful items.
There was probably a point where the internet suddenly started making you feel bad about hoarding things.
They tried measuring your mindset with your mental health and encouraged you to stop hoarding.
If people know you well enough, they’d know you like saving things. You always pretend something would happen and you might need those things. You never want to experience scarcity when you had the opportunity to preserve something and didn’t.
You are almost building a dream house with lots of space to put anything that you want.
If you want to talk about space now, this conversation will move in a completely different direction because you’ve always known you will be someone who wants a lot of space. Mostly because of the things you want to accumulate for the sake of the future.
It’s almost as though your mind works towards abundance but tries not to live in that bubble for so long that you forget to save things for tomorrow.
The ants, Joseph in the Bible advising the King to save up for famine, all of them summed up how you felt about keeping things.
They always come in handy. Yes, they do. But after reading those articles about reducing the way you hoard things, you started trimming down and trying to be a minimalist.
Oh, you are probably a minimalist, alright, just not with things you want to preserve.
We are talking about hoarding right now because I need you to know that you haven’t been a mad person for saving things.
There are things we can do with the things we hoard. We can reframe, retrim, refurbish items into a medium of creativity.
Creativity makes it possible to turn senseless items lying around the house into works of art.
If you've ever been on a film set, you will see how the props team make use of old perfume bottles to decorate a mirror side for the set
It will not only be impressive, but it will make you realize, the things we think are waste, to others, are the doors that open up the chance to save money for a shoot and still entertain us over and over again.
We despise those who work with waste even though, in retrospect, we are the ones generating the waste for these folks. What we don’t realize is how a creative mind turns waste into a piece of entertainment.
For all of us who are not spared from boredom, the waste we generate every day, when in the hands of a creative, becomes a tool of escape.
We’re excited to watch a movie to pass time, cure boredom, and have a good time, while not seeing the impact of the waste we gather everywhere.
Nature, even though we have tried to mess with it, still finds a way to nurture itself by planting seeds of creativity to foster an environment that is beneficial to us as humans.
We don’t see these things clearly, we obviously don’t, because we are absorbed by our insecurities, but they are there.
The man-made things destroying our environment and polluting everywhere, if recycled and reused creatively, can bring a satisfying experience for us.
What am I trying to say here?
Waste only feels useless until creativity touches it. And sometimes, the things you save, things that look like clutter, can become tools, art, or even escape for someone else.
So the next time you feel stupid and useless for hoarding things, remember, you can find a props guy and bring a smile to his face.
Ps: image generated with AI