One Wee Spark

For those of you who follow this blog, I would like to apologize for my silence. I am in the last trimester of my pregnancy and have been suffering from pregnancy-induced carpal tunnel syndrome. (Yes, pregnancy can cause it!) At any rate, my hands are giving me trouble, and typing is especially aggravating. So from now until the new year, I will be taking a hiatus. Please feel free to share the blog with anyone who you believe might benefit from it in the meantime. I get reports that tell me someone still drops by regularly even during my absence. Our last baby is due before Christmas, and then the holidays will be fresh upon us. Forgive me, but my time and efforts will be going to my family during this time. I have many things that I am pondering, changes I am considering. Specifically, I feel as though this blog has made me one-dimensional--simply the Child of a Hoarder. But I am not a paper doll--one-dimensional. I would love to expand and explore more of who I am and how I face lif...

When I meet someone for the first time, I realize now that I may or may not be a "stranger" to them. It's an unusual predicament to meet someone for the first time and be unsure if they know about your past (at least a small window into it), or whether you are a completely blank slate. Recently, I shared with someone I had met for the first time two months ago that my mother and I had been on the show last year. From the look on her face, I could tell that she was a bit in shock. I can only imagine the thoughts running through her brain: "She's look so normal." "She's one of those kinds--attention-seeking drama queens." And I could also tell that she also struggled with the first glimpse of who I am in relation to the disclosure that I had been on a reality TV show, and not just any show, but "Hoarders". Her next comment was priceless, "We'd just been discussing this topic this morning--who would be on a reality TV show?...

“ I don't know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, 'I'm sorry,' and then you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry.' If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as thre...