The Konmari Method took the internet by storm over the past two months. And I don’t know about you, but I was intrigued by what I heard about it. Before “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo” aired on Netflix, I had only heard the Konmari Method mentioned once or twice by a couple of YouTubers and bloggers. I knew that there was a book about it, but I never thought to give it a try myself. I had always been a pretty neat and organized person, so I honestly didn’t think I needed any help tidying up.
Then I started working retail. I accumulated more clothes working at that store than I could ever wear. And I honestly didn’t believe that I had a problem. However, I wore the same main items of clothing every week and a lot of things just sat in my closet with the tags still on them. I began to run out of space and hangers, but I didn’t even know it because I had a never ending pile of laundry that either needed to be done or put away. And if I’m being honest, because I mainly chose the same basic items to wear on a daily basis, most of those clothes just went from being dirty to being clean to being dirty again in the span of two or three days. I didn’t realize I had a problem until I decided to quit my retail job after the holidays. I began to limit myself to buying things I knew I was going to wear, but even then I still had way too many clothes.
As a joke, my mom got me Marie Kondo’s book “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing” for Christmas. I had seen this book many times as I wandered aimlessly through Target, and I had thought about purchasing it many times myself. That week I started reading it and I couldn’t believe the results that she promised. In the very first chapter, she claimed that she had changed people’s lives for the better. One woman even divorced her husband because of how she felt after using the Konmari Method to tidy up her living space.
Around this same time, I started going through my clothes to try to get rid of the ones I no longer needed. At first I was just going through them in the way I had always done it, seeing what I didn’t wear anymore and deciding if I would ever wear it again or if it should be donated. Well, I did this and when I was done, while I had gotten rid of a lot of clothes, I still had way too many. So a few days later, I came back to it and decided to use the Konmari method to go through it. I turned on “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo” on Netflix and I began my tidying journey. I ended up getting rid of way more than I had originally expected. I went through everything in my closet two or three times. Surprisingly, items I thought I couldn’t live without were the ones that I ended up giving away because they no longer sparked joy for me. After I was done with my clothes, I started doing this with other things in my room. I have gotten rid of more things in this two month span than I have in the past year!
I honestly didn’t understand the hype when I first learned about the Konmari Method. But now I can say that I am a firm believer in this, and I am going to continue tidying in this way. And I know that there are a lot of memes of Marie Kondo and “sparking joy” out there right now, but don’t let the haters discourage you from trying it. The Konmari Method works, and now I can see why it would make the woman mentioned in the book want to get a divorce. It is truly a magical and life changing way of tidying up your space and your life.