I was up late reading the other night. One of those long articles I’d been meaning to get to about something else entirely. And somewhere in the middle of it, a single line stopped me.
A researcher at the University of California San Diego, a psychiatry professor named Catherine Ayers, has been studying this for years. She put it about as plainly as anyone can.
There’s only one mental health condition besides dementia that gets more common, and more severe, the older you get.
It’s hoarding.
Not anxiety. Not depression. Not anything else.
Just hoarding.
And the statistics are honestly stunning when you sit with them. Researchers studying late-life hoarding estimate it affects around seven percent of adults over sixty. Among adults over seventy, the rate goes even higher. The clinical work on this comes from groups like the CREST treatment trial, an NIH-funded study currently looking at why hoarding gets worse with age and what actually helps people who are dealing with it.
I set the article down.
Looked across the living room at the bookshelf I’d been meaning to deal with for six months.
Walked into the kitchen and stared at the drawer with the rubber bands and the twist ties and the dental floss containers I keep saving for some reason I still can’t quite explain.
And I asked myself the question I keep coming back to lately.
When did this start?
Because it wasn’t like this when the kids were home.
It wasn’t like this when I was forty-five.
Something has been changing in the last few years, and I don’t think it’s me, exactly. I think it’s me-plus-the-math-of-being-sixty-something.
If you’ve been wondering the same thing about your own house, about your own slow-growing piles, about why this seems to be getting harder instead of easier, this post is for you.
What I’m about to walk through isn’t a diagnosis. It isn’t a checklist. It isn’t an alarm.
It’s an honest acknowledgment that for a lot of women our age, the house started filling up around the same decade. And there are real, specific reasons for that, none of which mean we’re hoarders.
Some of them are about our lives.
Some of them are about our brains.
Some of them are about our loved ones.
And once you can name what’s actually happening, the whole conversation gets easier.