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I have always been an avid collector. On the playground as a kid, I would fill my backpack with shiny rocks until my mom got concerned that the weight would hurt my back. I carefully counted and categorized a tall container’s worth of marbles. I played with them like dolls, creating families and lore among the different colors and textures. At a certain point in my life, I stopped collecting tangible things and started collecting specific pieces of media. I was a kid in middle school who was into all the “fangirl” TV shows, bands and novels. I was into Percy Jackson, Sherlock, My Chemical Romance and Dan and Phil all at the same time. There were so many pieces of media that I clung to in a major, insufferable kind of way. Still later, as I developed a personality that wasn’t defined by what I consumed, I started collecting knowledge. Trivia was my game and interesting facts were my icebreakers. I savored little bites of interesting information from any source and allowed myself to become known as knowledgeable. All of these phases — a collection of collections if you will — have shaped my own understanding of myself and my experience in this world. Tangible or otherwise, I think it is the act of collecting that is a primary way that human beings stay in touch with their humanity. We collect, curate and organize to understand the world and ourselves and to prove to ourselves that we were here.
Call me a crow or even a hoarder, but I take great joy in pocketing and decorating myself with little lost objects. I have little discarded safety pins and ribbons on some of my clothes. I have broken and useless objects from my sport that remind me of certain events or places. Mine is hardly an organized collection of these objects and I probably couldn’t even find half of it in my room, but it is the act of collecting these things that cements the experiences in my mind. With these things, I have physical evidence that I was in a place. My act of picking it up, admiring it, pocketing it, maybe even laughing at myself for keeping such a silly little thing, and taking it somewhere else to add to a little pile on my shelf: this is a trackable series of events that proves that I was an individual, I liked something and I collected it. I was here and eventually there, I admired something, and thus I am a part of humanity.
This works for things that aren’t physical as well, like facts and jokes and bits of culture. A joke or fact or story is cemented in my memory when I enjoy it or when I think it’s relevant to other things that I think about. My approval of the thing carries it onward when I tell it to someone or write it down somewhere, when I make art about it or even when I incorporate it into my actions and outlook. My internal collection of these pieces of information contributes to my personality, my individuality and thus also my impact on the world.
My favorite gifts are those that can be added to a collection. My mom gave me a pretty rock she found on the road once. My dad once gave me a golf ball he found on a roof while he was working. I love hearing about my friends’ personal collections. Hearing another person’s interesting knowledge base is a type of love unmatched by any other. Collections make the man.