Life Lessons from Matt Paxton

Some time ago, I wrote a post about my distain for sensitivenew-age guys.  You know, the guys who get all excited about Movember and who fuss over seasonal beers like middle-aged ladies fawning over a Longaberger catalogue. 

Matt Paxton is the opposite of a sensitive new-age guy.  And he is the best.

If you don’t know Matt Paxton, he is an “extreme cleaning specialist” who is featured on the A&E show Hoarders.  On a routine basis, Matt shovels shit, uncovers plastic bags full of liquefied cats, empties out refrigerators crawling with roaches, and chases rats out of crumbling walls.  He deals with some gnarly stuff.

What makes him the best, however, isn’t his apparent lack of gag reflex.  It is his absolute unflappability. 

First, let me explain Hoarders.  The premise of the show is that 3 million people suffer from hoarding disorder, which causes them to acquire and hang on to items, even if they are broken, unusable, unaccessible, and sometimes even unsanitary.  These are people who are facing eviction, homelessness, losing their children….it’s serious.  And, obviously, if their problem was as easy as just picking up after themselves, they wouldn’t be the state they’re in.  But saying goodbye to things – even pizza boxes or spoiled milk – creates terrible anxiety in them, usually related to a loss or trauma that they had suffered earlier in life that they hadn’t been able to resolve.  The show provides a psychologist, an organizer, a team of workers to help cart the stuff away, and resources so that the hoarder can receive psychological and organizational help afterwards.  All in all, they seem to do a reasonable job of respecting the dignity of the hoarders, and also creating a safety net for them after the show has finished taping.

While everyone on the show is awesome, (Holla, Dr. Robin Zasio!) Matt Paxton is the best, because he will confront anyone at any time, but manage to do it with absolutely no anger.  Three foot mound of shit rising out of your toilet?  Matt is like, “Man, that is a pile of shit coming out of your toilet.”  Dead cats stored in your refrigerator and freezer?  Matt says, “You have cat juice on the bottom of your refrigerator.”  He just tells it like it is, and then he gets to work making things right.

And that’s the best thing about this guy.  I look around, and I see people who are spectacular at pointing fingers and laying blame.  We are a nation that’s excellent at looking at things from the safety of our phones, or our computers, but who are pretty dismal at actually jumping in and solving the problems.  Matt Paxton is the opposite.  He names the problem, and then he chips in on the solution. 

But here’s the really important life lesson that Matt Paxton taught me: on one episode of Hoarders, the hoarder’s mess had spiraled so strongly out of control that he had a homeless guy living in a shack in his yard and he didn’t even know it.  This was such a fucked up situation that the homeless guy offered to help clean up because he felt bad for the hoarder!  So Matt is talking to this homeless guy, asking about his story, and it turns out that he had been a stockbroker, but a failed relationship and subsequent addiction to crack had put him in a shack in a hoarder’s awful yard.  Matt looked at the camera and said, “Man, we really are all five decisions away from shitting in a bucket.” 

When you think about it, some of us are closer than that.  And I think most of us fear our horrible thing – be it hoarding, or addiction, or depression, or loneliness….or whatever it is that we feel is wrong inside of us – will be exposed, and that the world will abandon us.  What I adore about Matt Paxton is that he’s the dude who says, “No way.  What you are right now isn’t who you are, and I’m going to help you get back to being who you are.”  We need a few more guys like that.