Marie Kondo is the reason why my dysfunctional closet was organized. In this piece, I breakdown how I, an unacceptable organized individual, tided up my act. And you can do it too!
Kondo has captivated audiences around the world through her best-selling books about organization. She has been all the rage for a while now over something that seems relatively simple, but as I found out, takes a lot of effort to do.
The concept of organizing alone can be a daunting task. Have you ever looked at an overflowing closet and felt clueless as how to handle it? What about the “everything drawer”: the one where lose ends of the house (hot sauce packets, screws and everything else under the sun) end up in?
Well, I was recently faced with an equally serious conundrum and I decided to use Kondo’s KonMari method to clean up my act. The method analyses if items part of your home bring you joy. This concept is part of Kondo’s book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.
I was tasked with cleaning out my closet and donating clothes that I don’t wear or plan to wear in the foreseeable future. The problem was that I was a self-professed clothing hoarder.
I didn’t want to get rid of things because what if I needed them in the future? I wanted to keep it all; every last faded t-shirt, battered jeans and funky accessory.
But I also knew I couldn’t live like this. There was no point in holding onto things that I had no use in and accessing the things that I did use were starting to become harder. My closet was overflowing and it was starting to become a challenge to keep everything in its place.
So I made the jump. I emptied my entire closet onto my bed and decided to do make Kondo proud. But it had to be done properly; unworn things had to go.
Kondo’s method is to hold each item and see if it brings the person joy. If it does, keep it. If it doesn’t, out it goes.
So I started holding each piece up and thought about what emotions each piece of clothing made me feel?
I am the first to admit that I remanence on memories every chance I get, and clothes are not short of that rule.
Each piece of clothing I held up led me down memory lane: the yellow t-shirt with the stretched out neck-line I wore on my first day of university, the long, black, well-loved bomber with rips in its pockets that was a favourite during my second year exam season.
The pair of (extra) ripped jeans that went with absolutely everything weren’t off the table.
These things were pieces of me and brought me to where I am now. They were some of the clothes I wore during my most stressful moments and joyous occasions.
As I held up these pieces, they brought a sense of calm over me because they made me feel complete. But at that moment, they didn’t give me joy. I knew that they were things that I would never wear again.
Now, this wasn’t like that scene from Gilmore Girls: A Year in Our Lives, where Emily used Kondo’s method and essentially tossed away her entire house because she didn’t feel a sense of joy from the 3 seconds she held an item.
It was more than that. It was an unexplainable passage way to the beginning of the next stage of my life: one free from that mess in my closet.
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