Project Re-Rail: Marie Kon-don't-you-touch-my-shit

I'll be really honest. I only picked up The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up because I first read The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck and Sarah Knight believes in this KonMarie thing. I'll be extra super duper honest and add that I've only read the first 50 pages or so so far. But based on those 50 pages, I have a few guesses about Marie Kondo:

  1. She's probably neurotypical, or if she's on the autism spectrum, she's on the part that means you can reliably predict your interests for the next fifteen or fifty years.
  2. She doesn't have many hobbies.
  3. She's not much of a reader.
Why do I think this? Because based on these 50 pages, I've been told that over the course of six months, I should go through every one of my belongings and discard any that does not spark joy. I've further been told that there is a strict order this should follow, and "books" comes before "papers" comes before "miscellany" in this order.

Here are my problems with this.

First, if you're going to tell me to go through my belongings in six months and discard any that don't spark joy right now, you'd better be willing to pay for the replacement costs of everything I change my mind about in a year. I'm on the part of the autism spectrum that means I hyperfixate on things, but those things rotate at unpredictable rates. When I was sixteen, I happily spent over an hour explaining vampires to the nice lady running the OASIS test. Now, I couldn't give a fuck about them, but would you like me to explain to you the cosmology of Kingdom Hearts?

(Say no. It's a trap.)

I drive my boyfriend crazy talking about League of Legends, but for two months after Mortal Kombat 11 came out I battered him with the towers I'd beaten with Scorpion and how no one played Baraka professionally except one person but did I mention that person beat one of the top players in the world with him?? Child-me loved Harry Potter. Adult-me would like to explain to you how great a writer Seanan McGuire is. My checkout list at the library two years ago was almost maxed on urban fantasy; now I have 84 books out including self-help, financial education, Shintoism, New York City, and the persecution of Japanese-Americans in World War II. I've abandoned my fiction writing entirely, only to pick it up the next year and go back to swimming in it. I'll spend a month doing nothing but Sudoku, then switch to drawing when my brain starts to leak out my ears.

Do you see my problem with the "spark joy" criteria?

I know this about me. I can usually predict the likelihood of me circling back around to something, or at least doing so before the things I use to fuel that stop being of use (yeast that will go bad before I make bread again; paints that will dry before I ever use them). But even I make mistakes. I've had to rescue clothes from the charity bin when I realized that "I don't wear graphic tees anymore" me didn't account for the future "shirts should be loose and soft and can have whatever they want on them if they are" me, a me who could literally only be comfortable in my skin if my clothes barely touched it. I've spent half an hour looking for a pair of boots that I finally realized I'd given away months ago. I've given a friend of a friend hundreds of dollars of craft supplies and then (just a couple days ago, in fact) realized I should have kept some of those.

The "spark joy" idea is great to an extent. Really! I'm not saying the criteria as a whole is broken or useless. The criteria puts the burden on saying that you want to keep something instead of saying you want to discard something. Discarding becomes the default, not the punishment for things you don't use. My problem with the criteria is that it assumes that everyone holds onto things for the same reason.

And my second problem is: books? Then papers? Then miscellany? I'm assuming that my board game collection, art supplies, and video game system would be under "miscellany," but in what order? How do you break up "miscellany" the way you need to if you have stuff-heavy hobbies? And in what universe are papers harder to go through and get rid of than books???

Now, again, I've only read about 50 pages of this. And I'm still planning to finish it. Maybe I'll change my mind in the future, and either way I'll be posting about what I think of the book as a whole. But my reaction so far has been a lot of frowning and a lot of yelling from my self-preservation instinct.

Seriously. I could've saved myself like $400 if I'd just kept those jewelry-making supplies.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Flea and the Acrobat: The origin of this segment

I've been trying, slowly, to watch Stranger Things.  (Slowly. Very slowly.) But I got as far as the episode about the flea and the acrobat. The idea goes like this: Imagine a tightrope, with an acrobat walking along. The acrobat has to be perfectly balanced, because she can only stand on the tightrope if she's perfectly balanced. Now imagine a flea crawling along the tightrope next to the acrobat. To the flea, the entire tightrope is a surface it can crawl on. The analogy was used in the show to explain a dimensional door, but I have a different take on it. To me, having depression feels a lot like that tightrope. To stay happy with depression basically takes perfect balance. You need to be able to balance your mental state and keep yourself stimulated but not put so much energy into anything that you burn yourself out. If you wobble in any direction, you plunge down into the pit. Meanwhile, around you are these people who seem to just crawl all around the tightrope. Th...
Read more

What Does The "Undo" Button Do?: The Origin Of This Segment

I work in tech support. Please save your sympathies for someone else; I enjoy tech support. I come from a family of teachers. My mom and her youngest sister both teach Spanish, and their father taught finance at a local public university until his retirement. Education is in my blood, basically, and when the occasional tech support customer expresses amazement that I was able to make something seem so simple, I happily explain to them that tech support is my way of teaching students who all give a fuck about the lesson plan. (I don't say fuck on the phone.) But while I do enjoy it, I also have a good amount of Stories(TM).  Sadly, the origin of this segment isn't much of a story--but it is pretty important that I explain to you WTF the title even means. See, a couple days ago a coworker from a different department stopped by and warned me she was going to ask me the stupidest question I'd ever been asked. I asked her without blinking, "Is it 'what does the ...
Read more

What does the "Undo" button do: I'm not a therapist, but I play one on the phone.

From time to time I get the sense early on in a call that the person I'm talking to needs way more than just help fixing their computer problems. It's usually not that hard to spot them. They've got the hitch in their breath that says they're too damn tired for this, or their patience when they get interrupted by someone on the other side of the phone is just that bit frayed. I believe in the charity principle, so I try my best to believe that people can be reached. I try to say, okay, this person is probably tired, or busy, or this is the fifth crisis that's been brought to them in the past hour. And then... there was this person. I've had panic attacks. This poor woman was well past a panic attack. She was on the verge of hyperventilating herself into an early grave. I've heard more calm from a toddler on a sugar rush. You could hear fewer "sorry's" in an ancient East Asian court. In her mind she didn't know anything, she couldn...
Read more