Well, a few hours has gone by and I feel so much better. I filled 16 13-gallon trash bags with old junk from the closet, books, and now-broken porcelain and it's out in the dumpster.

Thanks for the suggestions about donating and selling, but I decided that I needed to do something now. I felt like if I didn't get a handle on this today and stop letting this stuff overwhelm me I wasn't going to get it done. And I'm not going to miss the stuff--I'm looking around and I don't know where most of it was--there's still plenty of things around--God, it was more cluttered than I thought.

It'll take me about two years to pay off the credit card. Those are the consequences of losing control, I suppose.

I still have more finessing to do, but the majority is done. I feel great, too. I feel like I overcame something that was pushing me down. And I feel like this is my apartment again--that it's not an antique store or flea market.

I'm going to make a bacon and cheese omelet for lunch and sit down at my now empty dining table and have a nice meal.

Thank you for having this forum for me to work through this. Maybe I made a bigger deal of my situation than it really was. I hope my neighbors didn't hear me breaking all that stuff. I'm going to do everything I can to never get to this point again. Thank you again!