Marie Kondo and Neurodivergent Space
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
I've been meaning to write more about animism, and I’ve been wanting to write about Marie Kondo. It's tricky because many miles of ink have already been spilled about Kondo. A subtle animism is central to the KonMari method - holding objects, thanking them, feeling their energy. This should be no surprise since Kondo herself is formerly a Shinto shrine maiden. But I'm not Japanese and there's a limited amount I can intelligently say about that.
What I do want to talk about is how the KonMari method appeals to a subset of neurodivergent people, specifically.
Note that I said "a subset." I Googled "konmari neurodivergent" and found an intense split of opinions, with some neurodivergent people saying her methods work well for them when nothing else did, and others explaining why it didn't work for them at all. I don't think there's any one method of doing a thing that will work for every neurodivergent person, so it's not very useful to debate whether a method is "good for neurodivergent people" or "bad for neurodivergent people" overall. A few things - like blatant ableism - are bad for every neurodivergent person, but otherwise, we're all different and will need different things. What interests me is why and how the KonMari method works for the people it works for.
One of those people is my girlfriend, who has ADHD with autistic traits (remind me one day to write about autistic/ADHD relationships, because I keep getting into them!) and who got into KonMari at a time when I was really struggling with situations involving my own house. She was long-distance and couldn't help directly, so instead she started looking at her own apartment in a new light. For her, the KonMari method was a game-changer; it gave her a new and different way of looking at the space she was in, and rather than returning to a messy state after finishing with the method, she's only continued to get tidier. According to Kondo's book, this is a pretty typical experience.
What I didn't expect, when I cracked the book open myself, was how many neurodivergent vibes Marie Kondo gives off.
I want to say this very carefully. I am not trying to armchair diagnose Marie Kondo. The picture someone gives of themselves in a book is selective. A living person's neurotype is none of anyone's business but their own, and no one but themselves and the people closest to them have enough information to give that neurotype an accurate label. Nor should they have to share that label, or talk about it in public, if they don’t wish to.
Nevertheless there's a vibe that emerges in the book's early chapters when she talks about her history with tidying. How she played tidying games as a child instead of more typical games with other children. How she obsessively researched and tried every kind of tidying that she could think of. How she helpfully barged in and tidied things for her family members only to realize later that she'd overstepped. I couldn't help but read these chapters and feel like a neurodivergent friend was enthusiastically telling me all about their special interest in tidying!
Whether or not that's "really" the case is none of my business. But I feel more invested in Kondo's methods because she is able to convey that kind of enthusiasm. I think a person who can immerse themselves in a topic in a way that feels relatable to an autistic person - regardless of whether or not they are really autistic - is more likely to have the kind of insight into the topic an autistic person will appreciate, and to communicate it in ways that an autistic person will understand. It makes me want to listen to them more.
Some neurodivergent people like to have many objects around them. And this is a common misconception about KonMari that seems to come out of nowhere - the idea that she is ruthless and will make you throw away all the things that you love. That's the opposite of how she does things! Her method is literally all about picking up objects one at a time, seeing how they feel in your hands, and keeping the ones that you feel good about. If it's not "useful" or "practical" but it makes you happy then of course you should keep it, in the KonMari method! The catch, though, is that there is a lot around us that we assume sparks joy when in practice it doesn't. It's just part of a pile. And KonMari will be ruthless about teaching you to discern when that's happening.
Anyway, it's been over a year (and a lot of tidying/cleaning without any particular theory or method) since my hoarder ex-partner left. And I'm at a point where I'm starting to have enough time and breathing space to take things a step further. So I'm starting this method myself now. I'll report back in subsequent posts about how it works for me, what I discover about the spirit of the house and the things in it, or maybe what was in my own mind all along.