Marie Kondo and Talking To My Clothes
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
One of the most distinctive parts of the KonMari method is the one where you talk to the objects in your house. It's really an emotional method. You don't just think in your head about whether you use the object enough to make it worth keeping around; you pick it up, you feel it in your hands, you see what emotions it sparks. If it doesn't spark joy, you thank it for what it's done for you before throwing it out or putting it in a box to give away.*
(*Kondo recommends against giving things away, but with items in good condition like clothes and books, I can't help sending them to the thrift store instead of putting them in the garbage!! I don't think this is against the rules, as long as the items do in fact leave my house.)
As I've begun to sort through my possessions, I've been amazed what the simple act of opening your mouth to thank an object does. I never realized just how much I had to say to the things I own!
Sometimes I couldn't fully part with an object until I'd cast around and found the exact right thing to thank it for. Kondo gives suggestions in her book - even when a shirt doesn't suit you and you never liked it much, you can say something like, thank you for teaching me that I don't like this kind of shirt. With a lot of my clothes, even though they didn't suit me anymore, I had something I needed to articulate about the times they'd been through with me, the people I'd met wearing them or the LARP games where I'd used them as a costume piece. Sometimes I stammered out a whole long paragraph of thanks to some item or other.
Other times, there wasn't as much to say. Sometimes, I was just like, "Nah."
There were also times when talking to my clothes helped me figure out what to keep. Sometimes I'd be in the middle of thanking an item effusively and I'd realize that I still wanted it, after all. Sometimes I assumed I'd have to discard an item because it felt weird - from associations with an old partner, or with a time in my life I'd put behind me - but when I held it in my hands and tried to talk to it, I realized that it still sparked joy; there was just a lot of negative surface energy in the way. I put those items ritually into the washing machine with some salt and afterwards they felt good as new. (One of them is a goofy cloak which I've started wearing around the house all the time. I'm so delighted by it now. I can't believe I let it molder on a shelf for so long.)
And there were times when the decision to keep something wasn't difficult at all. There were times when as soon as I picked something up it would elicit a squeak of joy, a "Yay!" or even an "I love you."
I don't think of myself as someone who has a lot of feelings about clothes. I've never been terribly interested in fashion or trends and I struggle to get any sense of my personal style. It was astonishing to me how many emotions I actually had about my clothes. It's like none of it was visible to me until I made it physical - by picking the clothes up, holding them in my hands, and talking to them.
Going through my books, a few days later, was even more surprising. I usually only keep a book if I like it, my bookshelves aren't excessive by author standards, and my TBR pile all fits on one shelf, so I expected that I would end up keeping most of the books and discarding only a few. Boy, was I wrong! When I put all the books on the floor and made myself pick them up and talk to them individually, I was amazed what came out. Some of my books, of course, I really loved. With others, I was shocked how much anger came out. I had so many books that I'd loved once, but that belonged to ways of being or thinking about myself and the world that aren't good for me anymore. I'd been collecting them - judiciously - for over a decade, and in the past ten years I've changed so much. I couldn't believe how painful it was to go through some parts of those shelves; at one point I despaired that I could do it.
I'm afraid I was a little bit ruder to some of the books than Marie Kondo would have liked. ("Who cares about calculus!" I remember saying loudly to the room, while putting a hefty textbook into the discard box. It wasn't the rudest thing I said.)
I ended up parting with about half of my books. But the ones that survived are the ones that delight me.
Hannah, my girlfriend, likes to say that cleaning a house is "a journey to the center of the mind." Never has that been more true than with the KonMari method! I’m learning even more about myself than I am about my possessions and my space.