Kicking a Different Kind of Junk Habit

For clutterers, Christmas is the cruelest season.

There are the rolls of wrapping paper, the cards, the envelopes, the ornaments, the catalogs cascading through the mail slot, building up and up.

Even worse, there’s the shopping, the mother of all clutter.

Samantha, a retiree and a member of Clutterers Anonymous, can tell you all about the shopping.

“It numbs our pain,” she said. “It distracts us from what’s really going on.”

Need a sun visor? Buy half a dozen, as Samantha did. In fact, start a collection. You never know when sun visors will come in handy, or how often you might lose them, or when you’ll run into other walkers in need of headgear. And they might be just the gift for that hard-to-please someone you don’t even know yet.

Before she came to her first Clutterers Anonymous meeting eight years ago, Samantha routinely would buy gifts for persons unknown. On the dining-room table, unpaid bills would stack up. In boxes and closets and out in the garage, the ungiven gifts would accumulate.

“For instance, I bought a wonderfully decorated cloth bag that would be a perfect thing for a nice, warm baguette when you go to someone’s house for dinner,” she said.

Can you use it for anything yourself? I asked.

“What use would I have for something like that?” she said.

Samantha and the others in her group meet once a week at a church in Simi Valley.

“Hi! I’m Samantha and I’m a clutterer,” she says.

“Hi, Samantha!” they respond.

On this night, only four people show, but the meeting rituals are followed all the same--the announcements, the request for donations, the reading of the 12 Steps, beginning with: “Step One: We admitted that we were powerless over clutter--that our lives had become unmanageable.”

Each member talks for a few minutes, until a buzzer signals it’s time to stop. There are stories of renegade kids, busted-up marriages, and parents who demanded much but gave nothing. This is not a group that gathers to chirp about marvelous new filing systems; each speaker makes it clear that clutter on the outside reflects chaos on the inside, and that fixing it requires a lot more than just another box.

“I used to be Suzie Spotless,” says one woman. “I used to arrange my linens by color, from light to dark. I used to arrange my kids’ toys just so--I wouldn’t even let them clean their rooms because they couldn’t meet my standards. Now it looks like a tornado has turned my house upside-down. I wish I could be like that chick on ‘Bewitched’ and just wrinkle my nose to make it all go away.”

Instead, it builds up. The woman says she suffers from severe depression; tidying up is sometimes impossible.

For clutterers, some places are more difficult to liberate than others.

A retired engineer, Ed keeps some parts of his home with an engineer’s neatness. But in one room, books toppled onto the floor by the Northridge earthquake remain just where they fell on Jan. 17, 1994--signs of a shock that hasn’t disappeared.

Shamed by the mess in their homes, some members don’t allow even close friends to visit.

Samantha said she became skilled at the art of camouflage.

“If someone was coming over, I’d take a nice antique quilt and drape it over the boxes of stuff behind the couch,” she said. “My act was that I had my act together.”

She didn’t. For every trauma in her life--and there were plenty--another box was filled with useless junk.

Some clutterers can’t abide empty walls. Others have to fill empty tabletops. But all of them can tell you about boxes.

There are the boxes of last year’s Christmas ornaments that never got put away.

There are the boxes upon boxes that rolled off a moving van and into a member’s already cluttered house after a relative died.

There are boxes of empty plastic margarine tubs by the dozen: You never know when you might need them.

Eliminating all this is tough but not impossible. The clutterers applaud after recitations of small triumphs. One woman has put up a hook for her keys. An aspiring painter has managed to create and send out his own Christmas cards.

Samantha still glows when she recounts how she confronted a foot-high stack of 5-year-old newspapers on her closet floor.

“I asked myself, ‘What am I saving these for? What value or joy could they possibly bring to my life?’ When I carried them out to the recycling bin, I hugged myself and said, ‘Yesss! That’s what this recovery stuff is all about!’ ”

Anyone interested in joining Clutterers Anonymous or starting a chapter in western Ventura County can call Samantha at 583-5011.

“That’s my real name,” she told me. “If I had to remember Suzie Q. or something, that would just be more clutter.”

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or by e-mail at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.