We were having some work done. Work that would only take a couple of months, if everything went to plan, but work that would mean upending our domestic patterns. With a kitchen completely out of bounds, I knew we'd have to fudge our way round meals and making coffee, that the air would hang heavy with dust. Temporary stresses compared to the horror of not having a home at all. But I'm a recovering alcoholic. In other words, a creature of habit. To make myself feel better, I started watching the show.

Look, I'm not a tidy person. I'm a reasonably clean person. Sometimes I sort things. It was the only real point of contention between my mum and I when we lived together, my inability to keep things neat and ordered. To her standards. As a child, I could understand that cleanliness was next to godliness - but tidiness? What was the difference between my Barbies being on the floor or in a box? I was going to play with them again.

"I'm a collector!" The subjects of the show protest, as six-foot towers of books teeter above their heads. Bar the Barbies, I've never been much of a collector. My dad signed me up to First Day Covers because everyone knows kids love stamps. I think it was intended as an investment. When I tried to sell them last year, a stamp expert told me they were worthless. I wondered if I should have spent more time training to be a stamp expert. I did buy any Iris Murdoch paperbacks I found in charity shops for a while.

Now I collect quotes. I keep them in my phone and glance at them every now and again. I also write notes to myself in a bid to juice anything swelling intrusively in my head. They bob up and down, bubbles of wreckage among the sea of really good writing. One past self screamed at me in all caps, "I AM OBSESSED WITH FAILURE AND THE GROTESQUE". That probably goes some way to explaining my awful Vinted compulsion.

I keep watching the show. I think I can write the definition from the title card without looking - acquire and keep things, even if they are worthless, hazardous, unsanitary... Things. Not objects. Things. Stuff. Belongings. My stepfather delivers another ten boxes of my mum's books. Labels from previous moves crossed out, immaculate capitals spelling out, "ESOTERIC," "HEALING", "VEGETARIAN RECIPES", "TAROT". They're stacked next to the second-hand clothes I bought that don't fit me, don't suit me, don't match the projection I made upon the listing.

The show is formulaic but then so are we. Something bad has happened to each person featured and this is how they ended up responding. "My things won't leave me," says one person. There's typically rage and fear once the clean-up begins. I want to say that the show is sensitive but the irony of turning a person who has turned their life to objects into an object is not lost on me.

Why is that sense of security so elusive? Something that essential to live a life, rarely given to or grown in another. Just so that they are able to say, "Yes, I can let this go."

Even if.