All or Nothing

When I was a kid in the 90s, my family went all-in on Christmas decor, and in particular my mom was a big fan of Hallmark ornaments. I was a budding doll collector, and Hallmark started putting out ornament versions of the glitzy Holiday Barbies, as well as ornament versions of various classic Barbies. It was pretty much inevitable they turned up under the tree with my name on them, and I was sufficiently fond of them that after a few years I put up some eyehooks under a shelf in my room and hung them for display.

Then one day the shelf fell.

Most of them were okay, but one Barbie lost her head and another an arm. These things happen, right? I'd repaired toys before, I'd repair toys again, you'd figure I'd just fix them or, at most, put the broken ones away and rearrange my collection, right? It was the early days of ebay, I probably could have replaced them.

Instead I just… packed the whole collection back into their boxes and never collected for it again.

I figured this was a weird blip in my head, didn't think about it too much since then. But then when we were moving recently, one of my Mulan figures got damaged. Not a fancy or rare one, perhaps ironically it was an ornament from a few years ago. I could easily replace it on ebay.

But my first thought was that maybe it was time to sell the whole Mulan collection, and I sat with that for a little while off and on and I think I figured out what's underneath it. I think I feel like I'm not worthy of it because I wasn't able to take as good of care of that one piece as I'd have liked.

In this case it's probably dovetailing with the stress of moving and the way my OCD likes to flare up into a kind of compulsive minimalism. In retrospect there may have been something similar going on when my Barbie display collapsed; I was in an awkward in-between year, having spent the previous year living overseaas as an exchange student and preparing to move out for college the following year.

I also know now that ADHD is a very all-or-nothing brain sort of situation, and that probably adds to it. If it's not perfect/complete/original, then what's the point? Well, the point is whether or not I enjoy having them around me, but I didn't understand that at the time.

For now, Mulan and her friends are stored safely away until I have a spot to display them in the new place. The ornament is broken in a way where I can't really fix it, unfortunately, but I'm not getting rid of anything else, at least not right now. I can replace it if I want to.

I think it's fascinating where these echoes come up so many years later, and I can see more of something than I was able to at the time.