Over whelmed

Hello @Dj and welcome to the forums. I'm sorry to hear that your health is declining, have you thought about having a chat to a gp to see if there's things that can be managed to help you health wise?

I hear you have alot of collections and that the thought of them being discarded if you were no longer here weighs heavily on you. It's hard when we don't have friends or family that we can leave things to, I'm not really sure what to suggest in that situation.

But please know you are not alone here, we will always help however we can. Take care of yourself, I'm always around if you want to chat about anything 😊.

Hi

I'm new too and your comment was the first I've read.

Some options could be

- if you have the energy, write a post it note and place on/under/in each item re potential worth and best place to sell

- donate them now to an organisation that has a volunteer that could help you sell them now - maybe keep 5 favourite items for yourself for the time being?

- write a will and donate to a specific organisation, and let your GP know

- if the above is too hard, write a letter about this and give to your GP for safekeeping

All the best

Hey @Dj, welcome to the forum. I'm only slightly older and struggled to find any sort of close relationships my whole life. By some not so small miracle I do have a partner who loves me but it took me until my mid 40s to find that. I also have serious health issues, prostate cancer, and a rather large collection of stuff. I have no real friends here and i never have family check in on me or show any interest in how i'm going.

A lot of my stuff is retro game hardware, and a lot of computer/network stuff... none of which my partner has any clue about. I think about similar things now that my time is very limited. Part of me says i should sell a lot of it off now, so that there's a lot less of my stuff in the house for her to deal with when i'm gone. But i'm still here and I do feel selfish for not selling it and leaving her with all of it to deal with but its such a hard thing to do to get rid of all of those memories. It feels like just giving up and waiting for the inevitable.

Not that I use a lot of the retro gaming stuff anymore, but it bothers me a lot that it will just be seen as old junk and discarded. If I knew someone who would really appreciate it, I would just give it to them. Someone who would love it as much as I do and give it a good home would be fine with me and solve a couple of problems for later.

So i don't really have any solutions for you, like i dont seem to have many for myself other than just taking things a day at a time. But I've found it so helpful reaching out here and found a lot of very kind and supportive people, which has helped me a lot. I hope it help you as well. You are important and you do deserve some kindness and support from others. If other people never saw that in your life, then that is on them. Hopefully you've got quite a bit of time left, but try to decide what you want done with your collection and how you would best like to see done with it. Then you can work towards putting things in place to make sure that happens when the time does come, even if it's quite a long way off. Even if it just brings you some comfort and peace of mind.

Take care of yourself Dj and know there's a lot of reasons why many of use really struggle to find the close connections in our lives. You're definitely not alone in this at all.

@Dj

No one says so need to sell everything this week, so just keep doing what your doing, and you may find it improved your motivation in the process. Like a lot of things, it's often a matter of lost of small steps.

I know it can really mess with your head when you have to start thinking about being gone. It's just not something we're supposed to do, especially in our early 50s! I'm always around if you ever want to chat.

One tip though .. if you want someone to be notified you've replied to them, rage them in your reply.... It doesn't do it automatically. So just like in FB, type an @ anda menu will popup with their username. We all get done by this at the start.

@MJG017 @Well hello there friend, just wanted to give you a Hey and a little update …

I did start selling off a few items and it’s going really well … $700 for a bunch of Furbys and over $1000 for some other random action figures I no longer need to keep … and currently my motivation is high and the drive to just keep on going with it … one thing that I’ve realised is many of my items have risen in value as they have been packed away for a good amount of years (up to 20yrs) … just wanted to call back in to say Thank You for your kind words they helps a lot when my motivation was low

I hope you are doing well mate ?

@MJG017 also … I’ve kinda sparked up a new friendship with a couple that collect (they have bought a lot from me) the husband is very much into retro gaming and the wife just loves 80s toys.
they are a younger couple and their love for collecting has deep routes in their childhoods the husband would go to car boot sales with his father and buy old games systems and games etc so now his recreating those memories by sourcing the items again. My being able to pass items onto them has actually given me some enlightenment I feel the items are going to have a second life past the lifetime they have spent with me …

I do hope you are doing well, I know you mentioned your own struggles with health issues and I sincerely hope things are progressing as well as can be for you.
If I could say one thing is that it’s been a very enriching experience to reach out and find fellow collectors (in my case a couple) that I feel I’m brightening their days with items that sparked that joy with me many years ago when I first got them. I don’t like to say YOU SHOULD but maybe you could consider the thought … there’s greedy people out there true, but there’s LOVERLY souls too so if you ask your heart to open up to finding the good guys/girls you could share in the experience I’ve just discovered

all the best Mate

Hi @Dj

I was just reading my last post and i typed "rage them in your reply". Obviously i meant 'tag' them, not sure how that got changed... at least you didn't listen and rage at anyone 😁

Thanks for the update, you definitely seem to be in a more positive space than you were before, which is great to hear. The retro stuff does seem to have really gone up in value the last few years. I guess a lot of the people who grew up with the stuff are now about that age where they want to remember their younger days and have enough spare cash laying around to spend on this sort of stuff. I've bought pretty much of all the old gaming systems that I had when i was younger. Atari 2600 and Commodore computers mainly. More expensive now that they were back in the day. 😃

It's great that a lot of your sales have gone to a very good home by the sounds of it, to people who sounds like they will treasure them as much as you do. Plus striking up this friendship is such a nice bonus. I'm so glad it all seems to be working out so well for you. Well done for getting yourself the motivation and getting yourself where you are at the moment, it's never easy to get ourselves out of those really low moments.

As for myself, there's not really any good news. I've been told there's nothing more they can do until the cancer has spread and i'm at stage 4. Where i'm eligible for chemo and any trials. But i was also told due to the aggressiveness it's already demonstrated, chemo is not likely to be very effective, so i'm still trying to get my head around the situation, which isn't really easy at the moment.

Sorry to hear that mate, I hope you're able to keep your spirits up and come to terms with things as they progress. Nothing more challenging than dealing with cancer. Just know you helped me with your kindness and I’m forever grateful. thank you for that.

almost forgot to tag/rage you

@MJG017