Or am I?

I really love spending time and reading through various journals, fantastic collections, awesome pictures & fascinating stories posted in this forum by you guys! And every now and then, I do get inspired to post and share my thoughts also. Here's my latest 'venting':

Being based and living in Southeast Asia, sustaining a comic book collecting & practically any other similar genre collectibles hobby can become annoyingly tricky. There's always the natural question of cost & availability.

A little over 10 years ago I had to relocate overseas for work, which made things even worse, forcing me to leave my home and treasured comic books & collectibles behind.

Until now I've been moving & living around the region, coming home only briefly in time for celebrating the year-end holidays. This means that I only get to physically see and grasp the vast majority of slabs and collectibles purchased online & shipped to Manila once a year, before they go back into storage. While I've been able to establish quite an effective system of having items procured online from sites such as Ebay and Heritage sent over to an LA-based consolidator's address (a friend of mine in the business), verified, accumulated then shipped overseas in bulk at a reasonable cost, it's still gets frustrating especially at the start of the year when I begin winning the occasional online bid for a slab and have to wait several months before I actually see what I won!

This also unfortunately creates a situation akin to 'hoarding'. Accumulated slabs and similar theme collectibles like statues and die-casts do take up a lot of space. Trying to control this as much as I can (i.e. given my situation 1/4-scale or larger statues/ dioramas for example are simply out of the question, also getting back into less space-consuming coin collecting), but even small things pile up. Took me a while personally to get focused on my CGC collecting hobby, so there are several slabs (over half of what I'd accumulated) & items back home which I will definitely need to somehow dispose of when I get settled back. Impossible for me to do anything major about this now apart from the occasional consignment here and there, and no idea when I'll be able to really sit down and better manage my 'hoard'.

I'm not sure if some of you are in the same or similar 'predicament' as me. Maybe not exactly under the same circumstances but I imagine a lot of us share a bit of the 'hoarder' traits also, as avid collectors who at one point in time in our 'journeys' sit back and make difficult decisions on which items to keep, and which to part with. And struggle with constraints relating to space, and of course changing collecting focus and even life priorities.

At the end of the day though, I'm still a believer in the adage that it's the journey that matters most, rather than the destination. Personally, I find that the angst I feel whenever I think about just how much stuff I will need to inventory, store etc whenever I get back home is simply overshadowed by the excitement I feel whenever I find an item I am looking for overseas, whenever I win a bid or see status of a CGC order shift to 'Shipped', and when I go back once a year, unwrapping packages, arranging my stuff, etc. Priceless memories over the last 10 years, for me. Helps make it all worthwhile.

Thanks for reading guys, and happy collecting!

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