For keeps.

I can’t really explain why this happened but the timing was right. At this time of year, after the holiday glut and while we’re still in the darkness of the end of winter in the northeastern United States, I always feel like clearing out the crap. So I ended up reading the book called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo.

The first thing I want to say is that it really isn’t a very good book, but I learned some good things from it (I’ll discuss those at the end of this-here blog-post). The second thing is that the author has some serious issues she is dealing with (the kind that could make good use of a therapist) having to do with anxiety around ownership of objects and fear of dependence on other people. Even as a child, apparently, she was obsessed with cleaning out her own and other people’s closets and drawers, and was only satisfied when she was taking bags of garbage to the curb. She bought an alarm clock and would wake up earlier than everyone else in her family in order to start the day on her own and avoid having to rely on having someone to wake her up. During recess at school she spent time alone instead of with other children, tidying up the classroom or random cupboards at the school. She found it hard to trust other people or express her feelings. She would save up her allowance money to buy home decorating magazines and to try out new closet organizing systems. This is eccentric, yes. And it also explains a bit about what is strange about her views on objects and clutter. She basically built a redemptive system for herself out of loneliness and throwing things away. And then turned that into a money-making machine of life advice clothed in the garments of tidying up.

So all of this is pretty strange, and accounts for how much of the time spent reading the book feels like it was possibly written by an interplanetary traveler or an unfrozen caveman lawyer. I would place it in the category of advice that you listen to, laugh about (perhaps inwardly, to be polite), and then mine for the parts that work for you. I say this because I could never follow the majority of the steps she insists I must take if I want to (she suggests) live the life I most want to live. In fact if I lockstep-followed her advice, I would not be living the life I want to live! So, I won’t be sorting through every single thing I own all at once over the course of a week or two (who has that time, and who really needs to approach it that way — when did things get that desperate?), I’m not going to sort by category rather than location (because it makes no sense to do so), I’m not going to put all of my books on the floor in one room and touch them all one by one (that sounds pervy, right?), I’m not going to arrange my hanging clothes by length (though I did reorganize them into categories and then by color within the categories), and so on. I’m also not going to take her advice on how to store each category of thing. I did find it helpful to fold my sweaters and then store them on their sides, so they run across the span of the drawer rather than sitting in stacks. Now I can see all the sweaters every time I open the drawer and the ones on the bottom don’t get smashed and wrinkly. But she also wants me to do that with my tshirts and socks. And I just don’t see that happening for various reasons, one being that it won’t be neater or more helpful.

In fact, the funniest thing in the book happens in the section about socks. I think she doesn’t mean this to be hilarious, but she writes this nonetheless:

“Have you ever had the experience where you thought what you were doing was a good thing but later learned that it had hurt someone? At the time you were totally unconcerned, oblivious to the other person’s feelings. This is somewhat similar to the way many of us treat our socks.” (80)

And that is hilarious. It makes sense only once you understand that she treats objects as things with feelings, things we ought to thank for their service to us, etc. And she believes that when we ball our socks up into each other for storage we are not giving the socks time to rest from their labors of keeping our feet warm. Her point in the above quote is also telling, because she is probably describing memories from her childhood, of family members being angry that she threw away things they wanted to keep. She does counsel in the book that none of us can de-clutter on behalf of someone else (a lesson learned by her the hard way). But there is no indication that she would allow leeway with regard to how decluttering should proceed. I mention this because this introspective moment (of becoming aware of the feelings of others) ends up being about socks rather than people, and most of the book serves as a justification for every single thing she has ever consigned to a landfill, whether herself or through her clients. Even things thrown away that were later needed serve the purpose of reminding us that life goes on without them (not a bad lesson, but strange when combined with a mania for discarding — as if part of life’s purpose were to manufacture instances for proving you can live without things you already have).

Still, I’m sure it’s helpful, for those of us who want to clear out the crap, to be reminded that you should never start the process with things that have sentimental value (so her idea that there is a correct order for tidying is not without merit, though I see no sense following the precise order she prescribes). Don’t start with boxes of photos or old letters. Start with kitchen items or your closet or bookshelf. There may be minefields of sentiment within those areas, but it won’t be one fraught decision after another. Save the clear-out of the gut-wrenching items for later, once you’ve developed the practice of decluttering. Getting rid of unneeded clothes and books helps hone the judgment skills needed to discern what you really need to keep from the more difficult categories (for more on that, see the part on nostalgia below).

There’s some advice she gives that teeters on the edge between helpful and insane. No scholar would be able to take her advice about which books to keep and which to get rid of — though perhaps we all could just let go of some of the volumes we always mean to read but never do. And she constantly gets rid of documents, including things that a person might need to refer to in the future, like appliance warranties, receipts, credit card statements, lecture notes, pay stubs or camera instruction manuals (“My basic principle for sorting papers is to throw them all away” (96).). She’s right that some of that stuff can be found online. And she’s right that something good can come of realizing that life goes on just fine even when something important goes missing. And she’s right that when you have fewer things it is easier to find the things you do have. And yet. She describes success-story clients who are as proud as she is that they constantly are throwing things away and I can’t help but think: that’s no achievement if you’re not thinking about why you keep having to do that.

To be fair, she does aim to have us think about what we are doing. Her deep point is that decisions about what to keep and what to let go tell us something about the life we most want to be leading, and that reflecting on that, and acting on those reflections by decluttering our dwellings may help get us on the path we want to be on rather than constantly idling on the untidy sideroads our lack of attention to these matters tends to send us down. It isn’t a bad point. And FFS it’s a book about tidying things so we need not expect it to go deeper than that.

And that leads me to the useful things I learned from the book.

The first one is to discard objects that do not “spark joy.” If you’re like me, this advice will simultaneously make you roll your eyes and strike you as profound. It applies selectively, of course (though I’m not sure Kondo would agree): various things I need to hang on to do not spark joy, like the box of tampons or the toilet brush in the bathroom, my gym shoes, books I don’t particularly like but that I need for my work, some useful kitchen items, and various things owned by my spouse — but it is a very helpful frame through which to consider decisions one might make about what to keep and what to let go. It is lovely to clear out some of the crap and find yourself surrounded mostly by things you truly love. Approaching your possessions in this way also helps you think carefully about what you might acquire. I mean that in two ways. If you are surrounded by things you love, you won’t want to add something crappy to that setting, so perhaps you’ll be more careful about what you buy. And maybe you’ll also realize that some of the things you currently own that do not spark joy — the flimsy vegetable steamer or the janky table that holds the printer, for instance — might one day be traded in for a better, more joy-sparking version.

(Here is where I register a real problem with her emphasis on throwing things away. She insists on getting rid of things, right away. I insist on trying my best to recycle them, find them new homes, donate them to charity, or keep using them until they have been used up (like the vegetable steamer or the printer table). Because no one should be as proud as this woman apparently is of how much crap they keep sending to landfill. So when I went through my closet I made three piles: things to be sold on ebay, things to be donated to charity, and things that are too ratty to be donated to charity. …Please mark this last category and do not give your ratty old things to charity, since that likely means someone who donates her time will have to throw them away for you. Throw them away. Also: if you know you’ll never get around to selling things on ebay, then just take it all to the charity drop-off and be done with it.)

The “spark joy” criterion showed me a few things about my own hording tendencies. It didn’t make me want to get rid of the tremendous glut of shoes I own — THOSE ALL SPARK JOY. But it did make me wonder why I can’t seem to get rid of cosmetics I never use. What role is it that those things are playing in my psychic life, such that I think I need them when, with most of them, they just aren’t things I ever use? Some of the things are there because they’re samples and I don’t have enough time to “try” them and my sense is that someday I will and then maybe I’ll like them. But that’s just dumb. If they mattered at all I’d make time to “try” them. And I just don’t wear much makeup anyway! This realization was good to have because it helped me get rid of a bunch of stuff that was taking up space and it will make me cut back on buying new products when I don’t need them. For some reason I get joy out of buying cosmetics even though, as I’ve mentioned, I don’t use them in great volume. I doubt I’ll fully stop buying cosmetics I don’t need (there’s the joy thing). But it seems likely that I will have learned to cut back on the waste and the pointlessness. Especially because it’s nice to look at the cabinets as they are, without the clutter. And it’s easier to find what I’m looking for when there are fewer things there.

The second helpful thing I learned from the book is about the limited use of nostalgia. Most of us tend to hang on to things that we don’t like or don’t wear or don’t want because we once liked or wore or wanted those things and having them is a kind of memory of a past self. Or we have things that belonged to parents or friends or partners who aren’t around anymore. In Kondo’s words: “when we really delve into the reasons for why we can’t let something go, there are only two: an attachment to the past or a fear for the future” (181). She advises asking ourselves, for each item that doesn’t spark joy and doesn’t get used but yet we can’t part with, to ask what the reason is — is it related to past, future or a combination thereof? The answers can be telling, and reveal, on some level, the kind of life each of us wants to have (so says Kondo, and on some level I agree), or our hopes and fears. It can be an interesting exercise, if you’ve got the time for it. That’s fine and I’ll never get rid of all of that stuff. (For some reason I can’t get rid of a bunch of ridiculously short Betsey Johnson mini-skirts and dresses from the 1990s, even though I will never again wear them.) But the book made me realize in a visceral way something that I probably already knew intellectually: that lots of important memories don’t need to be stored in objects. (Nonetheless, I did not get rid of my grandmother’s dress or my dad’s shirt and tie.) (And for some reason I can’t part with a whole stack of crewneck tshirts that were once important to me, even though an aging woman with a sizeable rack is unlikely to wear a crewneck tshirt ever again. Do these tshirts “spark joy”? I don’t know. I’m not sure what hold they have over me. Maybe they’ll get donated next time around. Or I’ll turn them into a quilt. Oh, did I mention that one of my hoarding madnesses is thinking I will one day magically have time to sew things again? Still working on that one. Not ready to get rid of the sewing machine.)

The third thing I learned — and this was the most surprising thing, for me — was not to buy storage products to solve clutter problems. I’m definitely guilty of looking at a bunch of clutter and then going out shopping for products that will help to store things in an organized way. But that is a way of refusing to deal with the clutter in the first place, Kondo says. And she’s right, of course. So many things that lie around in piles or gather in the backs of closets are actually things that need to move on. Attend to that first. Then, once you’ve got a closet that only stores things you really want to own, you can think about how best to store those things. In the meantime you may have solved the clutter problem by decreasing the number of things you’re trying to store in the first place.

So, with regard to the cosmetics. From now on, I can only own as many lipsticks as will fit in the lipstick caddy in my bathroom cabinet. Same with mascara (a particular weakness of mine). And so on. The storage is there to hold what I have and use, not to hide a mess I refuse to think about.

I don’t know if she meant to get me to interrogate my investment in objects, but somehow, she did. And I found it helpful. I still think a lot of her advice sits somewhere on a spectrum between wacky and insane. And I suspect she may not fully understand that many objects are more than just objects. Also, her constant insistence that her method won’t be helpful unless you do it full-throttle her-way is just nothing I’m ever going to fall for. But for some reason, a month later, I’m still looking forward, happily, to those times ahead when I can take an hour or two to sort through some part of the house that I haven’t yet had time to consider through the spark-joy / interrogate-nostalgia / declutter-first lens. So basically, she has made me insane too.