Marie Kondo and me

I first heard about the book when it came out. It sounded (A) horribly twee and (B) unrealistically (for my household) minimalist. I know my house will never, ever, at its highest and best, have no objects lying around. It's not how I live. I like having books out in the places I read them, I like having handwork visible, I like having lots of implements on the kitchen countertops. I find interiors with objects visible and in use welcoming and safe.

Then the show came out. My daughter asked me if I wanted to watch the show with her, and I said, no, that would start a guiltstorm. Then came the twitterstorm about OH GOD MY BOOKS (also my initial reaction to the book) and then the counter-twitterstorm about YOU ARE BEING RACIST AND ANTI-JAPANESE-CULTURE. Then, and this was the important part, people I respected started tweeting about their experiences, and they sounded like sensible reasonable people whose lives had gotten better. Unlike, say, Flylady, they didn't sound cultist, and the experience didn't sound based on gendered expectations. My online acquaintances were saying "Wow, I tried this, and I felt better." My online friends squealed "And she's so nice!"

So I started thinking about my life, and about what made me feel joy. One of the earliest things I realized that my browser window full of tabs was based on guilt: "I really need to get around to reading this." I closed three-quarters of my browser windows, butting them down to stuff I was actually reading. I felt fine. The few tabs I missed, I re-Googled.

That was a pretty nifty experience. Then, yesterday, I got up all my gumption and had my son dump all the clothes in the pile of baskets at the foot of the bed (guilt!) on to the bed. Then I scooped a bushel basket's worth onto the floor, sat and sorted, and repeated the process. I didn't say thank-you to the house, or to the objects, because that felt extremely unlike me. I didn't carefully fold the objects, because I wanted to get the bed sleepable-in enough by evening. In short, I took what worked for me and ignored what didn't.

And you know what? "Am I enjoying this?" was, for me, a much easier and much less depressing way to approach the sorting process than "Do I really need this?" "Is this making me happy?" doesn't trigger the waves of guilt and shame. Fun is the only thing clothing can't buy.

My daughter tucked up in the bed and kept me company. At my request, she put the show on and read the subtitles aloud. Guess what? Kondo really is that nice. She greets mountainous piles of stuff with glee and assures the participants she's happy to have something to do. She doesn't judge; she doesn't shame. She respects the objects the families want to keep. One Japanese-American wife is an avid collector of Christmas objects and has them everywhere in the house. Kondo asks what Christmas means to the wife, and she tells a lovely story about the warmth of her childhood and how special a time she has always tried to make it. And then Kondo helps her figure out a way to keep all her Christmas stuff so she can easily find it when she wants it.

Another fabulous thing about the show is that, unlike other reality shows (Queer Eye, and just about any quick-makeover show), time is shown to elapse. There are constant intertitles "One week later", "Two weeks later"; the Japanese-American couple went up to six weeks. Nobody's pretending this is anything other than a process, and the couples are frank about its sometimes being an exhausting process. I appreciate the truth about that.

So far I've watched two episodes, and then I was done for the day, and the clothes were sorted! A total of six Tall Kitchen trashbags are out of the house. I did two, realized I'd made a mistake, and sorted my two to-go bags into stuff that was mine, versus stuff that was my husband's. I had been feeling bad about making decisions for him, but I also knew that he went into guilt spirals. Then I continued and wound up with four bags for me and two for the husband.

So instead of being the sneaky "This just disappears and you'll never miss it" wife, which felt grody, I created bags containing outgrown clothes, advertising T-shirts, and T-shirts for companies husband had hated working for. When he got home, I told him what I'd done, and he said he'd review them. Then, at bedtime, I said "You can review these if you want, but if you'd like, you can just trust me and I will just dump these." He thought it over and said he would like me to just dump them. So I got stuff that wasn't making my husband happy out of the house, and I didn't try to sneak out anything.

Here are some reasons this system might not work for you.

1. Not having the energy, emotional or physical, to deal with all the stuff at once. Looking at all your clothing/kitchenware/books at once can be incredibly demoralizing, and often you won't have the oomph to process big piles.
2. Not being in a financial position to say "If I really miss this, I'll just buy it again."
3. Not being in a place in your life where "finding joy" is meaningful.
4. Just flat-out not wanting to deal with this problem in your life right now.

So. This might work for you. It might not. I genuinely had fun and was happier by evening than I had been at morning. I look forward to tackling my fabric stash. You know what? There's a lot of guilt in there, too.

P.S. I took another step past guilt. Most of the clothes I was discarding were worn out. (My local donation stores haven't accepted clothes donations for months, and word-of-mouth is that Kondo has made the situation much, much worse.) I put all of the discard bags in the trash. I could have done the perfect thing and re-re-sorted the bags into "good enough for women's shelters" vs "trash", but I gave myself permission not to let the perfect way stand between me and the good-enough way. I am still shocked by doing it, so if this is a thing you find offensive, please don't tell me.

P.P.S. If you decide to watch the show, start with the second episode. The husband in the first episode is kind of a jerk.

Decline and fall of practically everybody

My mother and mother-in-law live in progressive retirement communities. The idea is that you start out in a space that is entirely your own -- my mother lives in a semi-detached house, my MIL in an apartment -- and then when you become unable to live on your own, you move to "assisted living", where you're in a smaller apartment, one or maybe two rooms, and are checked on regularly and eat in the cafeteria, and if (God forbid) dementia comes up, you move into the dementia area.

I saw all of these at my mother's home when my father died, and I can report that all of these zones are bright and clean. In the dementia areas, there are many thoughtful touches to remind people of their lives, flight cages of birds, and a piano and record player for singalongs. If you're going to be demented*, it looks like the way to go. The medical health care wing, where my father died, is considerably more depressing.
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