WASHINGTON – My parents recall that my teenage room was such a disaster, the piles of clothes and old newspapers so high, that our dog Ozzie considered it equivalent to the backyard and used it accordingly.

Ozzie was clever enough to open closed doors, so my parents installed a chain lock on the outside. The chain naturally prompted questions from visitors, the most tactful being: “Why are you locking your son away?”

My problems accelerated after I left for college. My freshman roommate only recently told me that he had requested, but was denied, a roommate change after he was unable to safely walk from one end of our room to the other.

Living alone made matters worse. When I was in graduate school, burglars stole a laptop from my apartment. The detectives took only a few seconds to offer their first investigative finding: “Wow, your place really got ransacked.” I explained that nothing in the apartment had been touched, and that I hadn’t cleaned up because I had wanted to preserve fingerprint evidence.

There was silence. Then one of the detectives said, “We’re calling your mother.”

I said, “She knows.”

You may be surprised to learn that I am married. I should confess that my wife, Megan, was not briefed on any of these tales when we first met in Boston, and I made sure she didn’t learn of my special qualities until I had charmed her extensively. “I felt you kind of deceived me when we first met,” she told me recently. “You had your car professionally cleaned, a friend picked out your clothes, and you even hired a maid to clean your apartment before I came over the first time.”

For reasons I still can’t totally explain, she not only agreed to move with me to Maryland a few years later but also said yes, without a twitch, when I proposed.

Still, she wondered. “I remember going through your books before we moved,” she said, “and finding two or three copies of the same book. Who does that?”

Megan’s question led me to confront myself: Am I, as she puts it, the laziest, most nauseating slob in modern U.S. history? Or is something else going on – something more complicated?

Am I a hoarder?

Like most people, when I think of hoarding, the images are horrific scenes of uninhabitable homes.

After soliciting recollections of my slobbiness from friends and family, I looked into the scholarship on disorganization and hoarding. The first book I came across was co-authored by Randy Frost, the world’s foremost hoarding expert. Titled “Buried in Treasures: Help for Compulsive Acquiring, Saving, and Hoarding,” the book prompted a double take from the cashier when I paid for it.

The book includes a questionnaire Frost devised to identify hoarders. I took the test. One question was: “How much does clutter in your home interfere with your social, work or everyday functioning? Think about things you don’t do because of clutter.” Our dining room table and its chairs are covered with my piles of papers and at least a dozen bottles of fountain pen ink, so the idea of having people over is rather exotic.

Another question: “To what extent do you have difficulty throwing things away?” Answer: I tell my wife I am throwing things away, but, really, I just hide stuff in other places.

My clutter score qualified as “severe.” My “difficulty discarding” score qualified as “severe.” My “acquiring” score qualified as “severe.”

Frost has a corner office in the humanities building on the campus of Smith College, a women’s school in Northampton, Mass. He invited me to visit so I could be psychologically dissected in his advanced seminar on hoarding. I was to be the guest specimen. Frost is 6-foot-5, built like a basketball forward, with a tightly groomed mustache and much less than a full head of hair. He is charming and soft-spoken, two qualities that probably ingratiate him well to the thousands of hoarders whose homes he has visited.

Saving allows the hoarder to avoid making what they view as risky decisions. For the past decade, I have bought, nearly every other year, the same exact pair of brown and black Timberland loafers. When I’m done with them, I never throw them away. Something about throwing away shoes makes me uncomfortable.

These behaviors typically emerge in adolescence. My mom remembers that my years spent waiting tables were profitable for her because she could always count on finding dollar bills around my room. She barred the cleaner, who came to our house once a month, from entering my room, for fear that if the woman started cleaning, she’d never come out. My room often provoked arguments between my parents.

Frost’s research also showed that many hoarders have close relatives who behaved similarly, suggesting a genetic component to the phenomenon. That would be my father’s father, Sam. Nobody ever visited his apartment.

After my grandfather died, my father entered his apartment and was astonished. It looked very much like my house does now.

I told Frost I could sense my wife becoming increasingly frustrated with my piles. He said marriages with hoarders often fracture because the collectors cannot tolerate the boundaries their spouses set.

I told Frost about my son. He is only 2, but this behavior pattern needs to stop – somehow, some way – so he doesn’t follow my path, and his namesake’s, too. I explained that I feel desperate to give my boy whatever nurture he needs to head off what nature might bring his way. Now that Sam is tall enough to see the top of the dining room table, I wonder: When he looks at it, what does he think?

We sat in a circle in a small classroom down the hall from Frost’s office. I was tense. My audience was students specializing in the study of abnormal behavior, and I was the abnormal one. As I introduced myself, I stumbled over my words. But as I talked more, offering details about my slobbiness, I grew more comfortable. I felt like I was unloading a secret, a burden. The dozen students of Psychology 354, Seminar in Advanced Abnormal Psychology: The Meaning of Possessions, were there to help me, not judge me. In that setting, I began to sense, for the first time, why so many interventions had failed.

Later, I would learn from Frost that I keep my stuff on tables and in piles because having everything in plain sight provides comfort and, in a sense, a form of organized disorganization. If I can see it, I know it’s there. That was the practical explanation. But as the students questioned me – about the pleasure I feel acquiring stuff, the anxiety I feel tossing it – I sensed that there was something deeper, more philosophical. And it was this: All of the stuff I pile up is a sort of second body, my twin. The more I have of it, the more I am me.

I blurted this out: “What would I be without it all?”

Frost said: “What am I without my things? That gets to this whole issue. A sense of identity. What am I without my stuff? What’s happened over the years is the stuff has somehow invaded your sense of self, your identity, because without it you feel like you don’t know who you are.”

As the class stared at me, my sense of ease slipped away. I wanted to be anywhere but in that classroom.

Then a student asked the question I had secretly been hoping for: Have you told your wife that you think you might be a hoarder? The money question! My chance at innocence! I have a condition, Megan. I’m not a slob. I’m a hoarder.

I sat straight up, cleared my throat and delivered my response, which I had been rehearsing in my head for days: “I think it is hoarding. She thinks I’m lazy. So there’s a huge disconnect. She’s also a physician; I didn’t mention that. She’s a family doctor, so she sees a lot of mental health issues. Her perception of hoarding is the Oprah image, which is, let’s go into somebody’s house and see the things toppling over them. What I’ve learned is that, yes, that is hoarding, but there is another way of getting toppled over on yourself and your relationships.”

The rest of the class felt like a blur.

“We have run out of time,” Frost finally said. “Thank you, Mike. This is very brave, very courageous.”

Later, my wife and I stood in the dining room, clearing what remained of the junk I had begun disposing a couple days before.

We moved upstairs to the leaning tower of books and the nearby piles of magazines. We made two new piles: go-away and keep. We used the bed as our sorting station.

I asked, “Do you want to turn on the TV?” She said, very lovingly, “I want a new husband.”

This didn’t feel as bad as I had thought it would. I kept telling myself, This stuff isn’t me. If it all disappeared in a fire, my body would not implode, my identity wouldn’t turn to ashes. The stuff was not me, the stuff was not me – it felt like some self-help mantra. The more I told myself that story, the easier the tossing became.

As I carried the boxes to the car, I thought about a question I was asked in Frost’s class: “What’s your fantasy about how you want your living space to look?”

I said: “I love hotels, and when I go into a hotel room, I love how clean it is, and I love the orderliness of it. I guess most of all I just don’t want to be nagged anymore. I don’t want to be stressed out by it anymore.”

When I went back upstairs, my nightstand was clean, and the floor around my bed revealed carpet I hadn’t seen in months. It didn’t look like a hotel room, but it was close, at least to my eyes. We cleaned up my stuff throughout the house. It took all day and into the next one. I told my wife how much I liked everything clean, and she reminded me that I have cleaned before, only to relapse. I vowed this time would be different.

She said, “I hope so.”

I said to myself: “I know why I do this now. I’ve got this figured out.”

Two weeks later, the piles were back.