Coming Clean Quotes

“hoarders tend to be perfectionists, that each item they collect is one crucial part of an ideal world they are ever creating for themselves.”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean

“Maybe if I endure all my pain now, I could be happy when I am older.”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean

“Listen to what people mean, not what they say”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean

“One of the more popular theories behind the triggers for hoarding indicates that people who were neglected emotionally as children learn to form attachments to objects instead of people. When they do connect with others, they then keep any object that reminds them of that person as a way of holding on to those attachments.”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean

“EVERY NIGHT BEFORE I went to sleep, I would conjure the image of the actor George Burns in my head and ask him for the things I wanted most in life: new dolls, a best friend, and for my house to burn down. Religion was not a solidly formed concept for me, but I had seen a movie about God once; he looked like George Burns and was in the habit of causing trouble and granting wishes. I accepted him wholeheartedly as my savior.”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean

“No one questions the home life of quiet girls with good grades and kickline practice after school. My need to be seen as perfect was as compulsive as my father’s need to surround himself with paper.”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean

“I could sit in restaurants or parking lots with my parents forever, because I knew as soon as we pulled into our driveway, my family would disband and we’d all go back into hiding.”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean

“In my reading I found that many hoarders have similar stories to my dad. Maybe they weren’t the children of abusive alcoholics, but they were emotionally neglected at some point in their development. One of the more popular theories behind the triggers for hoarding indicates that people who were neglected emotionally as children learn to form attachments to objects instead of people. When they do connect with others, they then keep any object that reminds them of that person as a way of holding on to those attachments. Every”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean

“What shames us, what we most fear to tell, does not set us apart from others; it binds us together if only we can take the risk to speak it. — STARHAWK”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean

“You’re so strong. You don’t have to be strong all the time. You need to be brave right now for your parents. But I was not being particularly strong or brave. I was merely in a situation I had no other choice but to be present for.”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned from therapy: You can blame everything in your life on your parents,” I told him.”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean

“I remembered what it felt like to look at a parent who loves you and to be ashamed of them, and be ashamed that you are ashamed.”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean

“The older I got, the more obsessed I became with maintaining the illusion that everything in my life was perfect—and as the years passed, I depended upon it to fly me under the radar of friends and faculty long enough to get to college.”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean

“You’re so strong. You don’t have to be strong all the time.”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean

“One day you won’t be able to pretend everything was okay, and you’re going to hate us.”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean

“But I was not being particularly strong or brave. I was merely in a situation I had no other choice but to be present for.”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean

“I still needed my mom. I needed her to say the right things when my heart was broken, to help me pick a wedding dress one day, to teach me how to be a mom. I was just starting my life, and she needed to be there for it.”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean

“I imagined my father’s life without my mother: bills lost in piles of paper, mounds of laundry taking over as he continued to buy new clothes instead of washing old ones, dishes piled up in the sink until they were beyond cleaning, empty jars of Marshmallow Fluff and peanut butter littering the kitchen. My dad was so bad at adult things.”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean

“The memories are still there in the place in my mind I put them years ago, but the person in them doesn’t feel like me at all.”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned from therapy: You can blame everything in your life on your parents,” I told him. “I just wanted to give you a little fodder.”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean

“We weren’t the kind of people that good things happened to.”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean

“Germans are orderly, Catholics believe in Jesus, Austrians look like Germans only shorter, Jews had to put blood on their doors so that George Burns wouldn’t kill their firstborn sons.”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean

“She had become catatonic in her fear.”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean

“I would always be the girl who grew up in garbage.”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean

“father without my mother. He needed her—probably more than I did. I was afraid that without her to anchor him to a normal life he would be just as content to live in boxes or subway stations… to live without me. Wherever”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean

“It seemed beyond my understanding that a mother and a daughter could not love one another. Parents love their kids, kids love their parents—that seemed like a universal truth.”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean

“ate matzo on Easter and ham on Hanukah, and I was relatively sure that Christmas was somehow intertwined with my birthday. It all made sense to me at the time. I”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean

“My friends lived in clean houses; I lived in a dirty one. I’d always known we were different, but until now I didn’t know that different was bad.”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean

“I only wanted a girl. If you were a boy, I would have sold you,” she told me, and I believed her. I would have been named Eric if I was a boy. A boy named Eric who was sold for not being a girl.”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean

“My father is a hoarder. I can say that now, and people’s eyes widen in understanding. Maybe they know someone who is a hoarder, or maybe they throw that word around to describe their messy roommate, but hoarder is now a part of our”
― Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean