I'm a Collector...

...and you are, too.

When I was 10 years old, I was hungry for a capital-P Passion; for something external and aesthetic to define me, like Winona Ryder in Mermaids wanting to be a nun until she switched to Greek mythology. But when nothing presented itself to me in the shape of a muse, and lacking the self-awareness to look within, and kindle the passions that were already in there, I shrugged and decided I was going to collect business cards.

And I did: diligently, thoroughly, and indiscriminately. At the time, my family was in the process of moving from one country to another, and so I was going to a lot of different offices and stores, and at every single entity, I took a card, so I quickly amassed a wide variety, in a couple of different languages. Adults who saw me take the cards teased that I was networking, and jokingly asked me about my Rolodex (it was a different time).

But I couldn’t have cared less about the actual real-life people represented by the cards. I barely cared about the cards at all when I started collecting them. I just wanted to collect something. The first thing my eye found was a business card, and my brain was just perverse enough, even in 4th grade, to go, “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard! Let’s go!”

But then, bit by bit, I started to pay attention to the paper stock. To the colors of the embossing. To the names of streets I didn’t know, and credential initials I filled out with my imagination, this being pre-Google. To spread them all out over a desk and look at the collection as the dragon’s hoard it was, albeit about as anemic and uninteresting one as has ever existed.

I really, really liked–and still like–having a dragon’s hoard. But, more than that, this instinct to collect for the sole purpose of the joy in collecting things that bring you joy, is my absolute favorite thing about human beings. I watch a lot of Star Trek, and science fiction in general. Alien species encountered in these stories almost always have distinctive identifiable cultural traits–Klingons are aggressive, Vulcans are logical, etc. Recently, I was thinking about the kinds of cultural traits human beings would demonstrate in an intergalactic stage. In the stories we like to tell, we tend to cast our own species as inevitably becoming known as the species of empathy, curiosity, and exploration. It’s all very aspirational.

I think we’re more likely to become known the universe over as weirdo obsessives; aficionados of the idiosyncratic, writ large and writ small. As a whole culture, we can fixate on whether a dress is blue or gold: this gives us joy. I think that’s the exact same instinct feeding my friend’s mom, who collects vintage makeup compacts, to the point where she has practically an entire room filled with them: this gives her joy. It makes no sense. It serves no function except self-expression through appreciation. 

This instinct is my favorite thing about human beings. Firstly, because it’s an instinct based on deep, and deeply personal, joy. Yes, it can be derailed by greed, but this instinct to collect; to curate niche, miniature museums; to connect the dots between disparate objects and then between those disparate objects and the human experience…this is one of the most purely positive human tendencies I can think of.

It’s also, and here is where I get relevant, the most elemental part of storytelling. Anyone who is known to be of a writerly tendency has fielded the question: where do you get your ideas? I think we all have different answers to that question, ways we think about crafting character arcs or developing settings, but these answers are wrong, because the answer is: you get them from the junk store collection of shit in your head. Photo albums under the skylight, your great-aunt’s Madame Alexander dolls by the stairs. All the things you’ve read, watched, seen, enjoyed, heard, hated, experienced—it’s the dragon hoard in your head. You mix and match. Dialogue from one real-life road trip dropped into a story opener inspired by slasher movies. You meaningfully–or provocatively or satisfyingly or sweetly or terrifyingly–juxtapose objects in your collection in order to curate an exhibit, and hopefully the exhibit says something about its contents that hasn’t been said before.

Personally, I don’t collect business cards anymore. I moved on the keychains, shot glasses, and finally–and inevitably–books. I’ll talk more about this habit (fixation, addiction) another time, but what I will say now is this: I’ve never felt more joyfully myself–I’ll say that again: joyfully, needlessly myself–then when I’m picking something for my collection, saying to a volume, “Yes, you. I see me in you.”

Everybody collects. Even if they think they don’t, they probably have eighteen dead lighters in a drawer. It’s why I’m always curiously looking through people’s things–I’m not rude, I’m trying to get to know you! Do you have every limited Starbucks gift card from the 2000s glued and grouted to a coffee table? How about six trunks full of period salt shakers? Please show me! I want to read your story!

I don’t really have a moral or a button to end this post on, except maybe to say, this is why you don’t chase trends. If your story isn’t coming from your own personal dragon hoard in some way, you’re not really communicating. You’re writing, but you’re not storytelling.

And I’m really hoping the Vulcans move up First Contact, so I want all us humans to put our best foot forward.