Clothing Chaos: Dee's KonMari Adventure

         

           It has begun!

           Last Sunday (because after saying that Monday was my consistent day off, I got called into work…) I took the plunge and began my #KonMari journey to tidiness, organization, balance and ultimate joy…barf. Okay, I don’t know about that, but I certainly cleaned the shit out of my clothing collection.

            If you don’t already know, the world sucks and I’m tired of being angry and terrified, so I have decided to do an incredibly fluffy, mommyblog-style series about a crazy book I read called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by Marie Kondo. The book is an eerie blend of infomercial-style overselling and the ravings of a madwoman who anthropomorphizes socks. I highly recommend it for its entertainment value. Friends of mine who have used the cleaning technique illustrated in the book, dubbed the KonMari Method, have assured me that it is incredibly effective, questionable sanity of its founder aside.

            I had done a fair amount of research on the KonMari method, and I was pumped up and ready to go…until the day actually came. I awoke Sunday morning to horrendous flashbacks of my mother buried in my overstuffed childhood closet every spring, throwing crumpled articles of clothing at me at the speed of light.

            “Do you want this?” she demanded, holding up an old sweater, “How about this? This? Come on, Danielle, we don’t have all day.”

            Meanwhile, Child Dee’s heart pounded faster with every balled up sock thrown, as piles and piles of the useless stuff I had shoved into my closet bled into the bedroom, knowing I would have to clean it all up.

            I can’t believe I spent two weeks gearing up for a cleaning method without remembering how much I fucking hate cleaning.

            I mean, I’ve come a long way since my slobby childhood ways, but I think that’s only because I’ve perfected my old method: Straighten up the areas that people see, and shove everything else in closets, drawers, and cupboards until the doors have to be held closed with a chair.

            The smooth façade of calm with hidden chaos threatening to burst the seams. My cleaning style is the perfect representation of my anxiety disorder. Ten points to Freud.

            Adesso, I procrastinated for a good long while, but finally, largely due to this commitment that I made to you, my invisible/imaginary readers, I forced myself to get cracking.

            For those unfamiliar, the KonMari method boils down to these simple actions:

1. Choose a category of stuff to clean (rather than by room.)

2. Find everything fitting that category in your house and throw it all into a huge shame pile.

3. Wallow in your consumerist shame, naked barefooted walk through the kingdom with bell-ringing nun optional.

4. Go through your shame pile, holding each object in your hands. If said object does not “spark joy,” discard it. Keep nothing that does not fill you with girlish glee.

5. Re-organize the stuff you’re keeping so that every single thing has its own particular place. This avoids consumerist bender relapses and future shame piles.

                                     

            I have to say, I was not looking forward to ripping every item of clothing I own out of the hidden spot I’d stuffed it into and throwing it in a pile on the bed. I’m a crafty pack rat; I’m well aware of the volume of shit that lurks in the shadowy corners of my closet, and I wasn’t in the mood to confront it. But it had to be done! So I took a deep breath, threw on some Psyclon Nine for motivation, and dug out every single top and bottom I had (the method dictates that every category must be done by subcategory in a certain order.)

            Behold, the before and after, complete with stubborn immovable feline.

                                     

            Jesus tap-dancing Christ. This was so much worse than I thought. These aren’t even all of my clothes…they’re just my shirts and my pants!

            Well, now there was no going back, unless I wanted to sleep buried beneath my shame pile later that night. I gritted my teeth and crawled onto my bed.

            The KonMari method demands that I hold every article of clothing in my hand and wait for it to spark joy in me before deciding to keep or discard it. I have to admit, I am someone who constantly rolls her eyes at the term spark joy. It’s clothing. I am known for having an affinity for inanimate objects, but not clothes. I have a habit of cutting, ripping, and Frankenstein-stitching old clothes together to make new outfits for dance or for Ination. I have little to no respect for my clothing, so I truly doubted that anything I owned that wasn’t my wedding dress would fill me with glee. I reached out and grabbed my first article of clothing: A shiny, bright purple blazer; the blazer I use on the oddly frequent occasions I dress up like the Joker.

            And suddenly I was all warm and fuzzy inside.

            Holy shit, are these feelings? For a blazer?

            Okay, I wouldn’t call it joy, but the blazer did make me happy despite its lack of versatility, and the KonMari method is all about keeping what makes you happy, so into the ‘keep’ pile it went.

            I got into the groove very quickly. I have to admit, I didn’t stop and consider every single article of clothing before stuffing it into the keep or discard pile. I often knew just by looking that I would keep or throw something away. The Hometown Cleveland shirt I picked up in Little Italy? Keep. The itty bitty crop top that’s super cute but doesn’t totally fit over my chest? Pitch it.

            I did have a few minor hesitations here and there, like the red and black top that I never wear but showcases my boobs fantastically when I do, but overall, it was fairly easy to get rid of clothing I don’t often wear because it served my ultimate goal: Live with less shit.

            But then, out of nowhere, a huge roadblock. I picked up a tiny black shirt and was confronted by the sweet, scarred face of Edward Scissorhands. My heart skipped. I fell in love with Edward Scissorhands the movie when I was sixteen, and I bought this little black t-shirt at Hot Topic shortly after. Edward stares out from the fabric, surrounded by his ice sculptures and glow-in-the-dark speckles of snow, If he weren’t up there now, I don’t think it would be Snowing, proclaims the shirt; one of my favourite lines in the film, as badly tied in as the fairytale aspect of the story was (yes, I’m a snobby cinephile even with my favourite films.)

            As a teenager, I only wore the shirt in winter, due to its snowy theme. As the years passed, I tried to wear it on the first day of snow of the year. But then my breasts got bigger, and bigger, and now I couldn’t wear the shirt without Edward’s doe-eyed little face getting broken and stretched to within an inch of his life. This Tim Burton top remained lovingly tucked away at the bottom of my shirt drawer, not having seen the light of day since I transferred it from a moving box to the dresser.

            I was quite surprised by the powerful hold this little shirt had on me. Did it spark joy?

Absolutely. But did I wear it? Never. According to the KonMari method, I had to keep it. But for my ultimate goal of living with less shit, this was a problem.

            As I sat on my bed, cradling a decade old shirt like Marius cradling the dying Eponine, a section of the KonMari book crawled into my memory. In the clothing chapter, Marie Kondo had mentioned that there would be items you no longer use, but had a strong hold on you nonetheless, for one of two reasons: holding on to the past, or keeping it “just in case” for the future. If the reader was struggling with an object from their past, she suggested lovingly thanking the object for the work it has done; for the cherished memories, or for teaching the reader about what style doesn’t work on their body, or what have you. Then, it should be easy to discard the object, because you honoured its service. I had written the advice off as more of Kondo’s bizarre and irritating idea of considering objects to be living things. But as I looked at my beloved old shirt with an unexpected amount of sentimentality, I thought, fuck it, why not give it a shot?

            I hugged the tiny tee, pressing Edward against the breasts that caused him such strain.

            “Thank you for the memories.” I whispered, feeling like a complete idiot.

            And believe it or not, when I pulled away from that inanimate shirt hug, it was like a fog had lifted. I folded the tee, Edward side up, and tucked it into the discard pile without a stab of guilt.

            Yup!

            I felt like a freak doing it, but it turns out that voicing your appreciation for an object actually helps. Looking back, it actually makes sense. In researching the KonMari method, I found countless sassy blogs and think pieces written by professional organizers (yes…that’s actually an occupation. I didn’t believe it, either) who dismissed the KonMari method as ridiculous because of the “spark joy” rule. “My work uniform doesn’t spark joy,” they’d say, “but I can’t exactly discard it, now, can I?”

            I rolled my eyes at these critics. I can’t stand people who take ideas so literally that they dismiss it, even though the bones of the idea can be useful. Ever heard the term “it goes without saying,” you plebeians? If I took the KonMari method literally, I would have a wardrobe of nothing but studded bras and hot pants. A cleaning method, like the Bible for modern Christians, is not meant to be taken literally. Keep your non-joy-sparking skillets and work shirts and kitchen scissors, you idiots, but if the excess shit you have doesn’t make you happy, get rid of it. That is the point of the freaking method.

            Well, I realized that I had, in fact, been one of those literalist morons with another aspect of Kondo’s book. All throughout this post, and my intro post to this series, I have called Kondo insane for anthropomorphizing objects. It took my Edward Scissorhands shirt for me to understand the actual message beneath her lamentations of the burdens of overstuffed purses or the suffocating of knotted panty hose: Respect your possessions.

            I’m not saying you literally have to thank your purse for holding your cell phone, like Kondo actually does every day, but respecting your possessions actually has a practical purpose. When I get home, I have bad habit of tossing my keys wherever there’s room and throwing my coat on a nearby chair. I’m not about to name and baptize my coat, but if I had more respect for it, if it were something more precious to me like my wedding ring (which always goes on the ring holder when I wash my hands,) then it would keep me in the habit of putting my coat where it belongs, in the closet. Respecting your possessions makes it easy to stop being lazy and walk the extra two feet to the closet door. This idea is actually a pretty genius way of keeping clutter under control. And if I respected my keys enough to put them in their designated bowl every time I was finished with them, I wouldn’t spend every ten minutes before work scrambling to find my keys. Even with her crazier ideas, like greeting your house when you come home, has a useful underlying message. In acknowledging my home, it would remind me to be grateful of what I have. I’ve had a lot of maintenance issues with my apartment (landlords who have no idea what they’re doing,) but if I take a moment to acknowledge the space itself, I remember how beautiful it is, and how I fell in love with it when I first saw it. Even though we are most definitely moving when our lease is up, doing this keeps me content to live here until that time. I’m not about to get down on my knees and ask my home to help me find serenity (another KonMari practice,) but I will eat my hat and note my own hypocrisy in dismissing parts of this method by taking it too literally.

            I did hit a few more roadblocks, but after the initial tops and bottoms debacle, I was able to sail through many of the other categories: dresses, jammies and loungewear, even my dreaded, over-stuffed sock and panty drawer was relatively painless. I did experience a bit of burnout after 3 hours of discarding, though, so I ended up breaking the rest of the clothing categories (gloves and hats, scarves, swimwear, shoes and purses, etc) into little chunks throughout the week. This helped me keep a clearer head and not get frustrated and start stuffing things back into the hellhole closet from whence they came. And I did learn something about myself while discarding: I thought my major issue with clothing would be keeping things “just in case,” since I have a long history of re-purposing my clothing for crafty projects or edgy new outfits. It turns out that I have a problem with sentimentality and clinging to the past with my possessions as well.

            Here is a photo montage of some of the items I had trouble with. I’m not posting them because I think my invisible/imaginary readers have a deep and burning need to know the history of my clothes, but because the only way I could let go of some of them was to promise that I would preserve the memories attached to them in blog form. And who knows, maybe by posting examples of my sentimental struggles will help any of you who decide to take the plunge and try this method in your own homes.

                                                       

My high school hoodie (sorry the back is sideways.)
This hoodie was the result of our senior class
Economics project. I drew the tribal knight design
--we were the Black Knights--
for the front, and another student did a design on the back.
I single-handedly saved this project from
failing by tracking down the screen printer
and visiting him myself to pick up the
clothes. The guy obviously sucked at his job.
I mean, look at it. Yeesh. I discarded this
because I never wear it. And
nobody calls me D-Babe anymore.

I bought this on a trip to Universal Studios
in Orlando. It never fit very well, but it
is the source of one of a sassy burn I delivered
to a creep on the hockey team years ago. I
was teaching yoga to the BGSU hockey team to
improve their flexibility.
"So...where's Thing 2?"one of them asked, giving me
that creepy up-and-down look every woman
has to experience multiple times in her life.
I looked him up and down and shook
my head.
"Not in this room, that's for sure."
BOOM.
Not great, but I'm not usually quick enough"
to respond to creeps, so I'm still proud of that.

                                                       

Oh, God, my red velvet dress. I bought it when I was
in junior high. I love this ratty thing. It's falling apart, ghetto-sewn together,
and it hasn't fit my chest since I was 17. I've worn it every summer,
but it's really time to let it go. It's a(nother) nip slip waiting to happen.

An old shirt I painted a Lestat quote on in high school. I've
had a hard time letting it go because I still love the quote
and the character (well, in the first three books) to this day.
"So until we meet again, I am thinking of you always; I love you;
and I wish you were here...in my arms."

My Squee shirt is possibly the single biggest
sentimental thing I own. It's an XL, faded from countless washings,
and I don't even sleep in it. However, I'm keeping it. It sparks ALL THE JOY.
When I mentioned it to my ultra-practical, totally unsentimental mother, even SHE
said, "Oh, your Squee shirt. You're not getting rid of that."
There's always room for Squee in my jammie drawer.

            After the Great Discarding was over, it was time for the next step in the KonMari method: finding a place for everything I kept. With clothing, that is fairly easy. Coats go in the coat closet, hangable clothing goes in the bedroom closet, everything else goes in the drawers. Bada bing, bada boom. Done.

            Marie Kondo has a few things to say about how clothing should be treated, and it’s not all quite as crazy as her monologue on the evils of balling up your socks. Kondo believes that the traditional way of folding clothing is a terrible use of drawer space. She says that stacking clothing on top of one another causes wrinkles for clothing on the bottom of the pile due to the weight of everything on top of it, and it causes much of our clothing to be forgotten because it is at the bottom of the stack. The KonMari method urges the reader to convert to vertical folding: Folding your clothing in such a way that it stands up on its own, and setting your clothing in a row in your drawer, rather than stacks. Not only can you fit more clothing in a drawer that way, Kondo claims, but you can see every single article in the drawer at all times, making it easier to find and to keep organized.

            Well, I found some instructional videos on the KonMari method of folding and gave it a shot, and guys…this 5 foot organizational wunderkind is absolutely right.

            The method of folding took me a second to get it right, and not every single piece of clothing will stand up entirely on its own, but I did the best I could, and…just look at how sexy my drawers are right now.

                                     

God.....DAMN.

            I truly wish I had had the forethought to take “before” shots of my drawers, because they were absolute chaos. Single socks drifting aimlessly, wrinkles piles of shirts from digging through the stacks to find what I was looking for, they were awful. And now, holy shit! I don’t have to dig for shirts anymore; I can see every single one of them the minute I open the drawer. My socks and their mates are finally together and not buried on opposite ends of the helldrawer. I got so excited folding that I even pseudo-arranged everything by colour and shirt type. I am a little embarrassed by how happy an organized drawer makes me.

            So, category 1 is done. How was the experience?

            Honestly, it wasn’t as harrowing as I thought it would be. If you follow KonMari’s method in order(link), it truly does go as smoothly as she advertises. Discarding so much clothing made organizing much easier, and if I continue to hold to the lesson of “respect your possessions,” I will respect my clothing enough to fold it and put it away in a timely and organized fashion. If you’re like me and clutter really stresses you out, so far, I couldn’t recommend this method more highly, hokey language and inanimate anthropomorphizing and all.

CATEGORY 1 STATS
Hours: Overall, around 5 hours, though most of it was broken up into digestible pieces.
Bags of Stuff: 8 bags; 2 trash, 6 to be donated to a local homeless shelter.

            This weekend, I tackle my most beloved and pain-in-the-ass possessions: My books.

            Deeeeeep breath. I can do this.

Side note, I found (and totally kept) skull suspenders.
am I sexy hipster now?
This outfit needs glasses and irony.