Marie Kondo, back away from my junk
I’ve got baggage I’m not ready to bury
More than one well-meaning friend has touted a newfound obsession with Marie Kondo, the Japanese home-organizing and clutter-clearing phenomenon. They wax poetic about her contagious charm and their euphoric emancipation from clutter. They then pause for a moment, politely, before strongly suggesting I “check her out.”
When I ignore my friends’ cues, they tell me that my clutter is holding me back. They cheerfully suggest that 2019 be the year I finally deal with my stuff, that living rooms are not intended as storage facilities.
Thank you for your Kondo-cern, but I politely decline. Flying in the face of best-selling book sales and sycophantic social media posts, I’ve done a deep dive into Marie’s mantra and have decided to keep my crap.
The premise of “Kondo-ing” is that your accumulation of stuff is holding you back from happiness and you should cull your crop of crap and discard every item that does not bring you joy. Purging will supposedly free you from the shackles of possession prison.
That is exactly where Kondo and I disagree. Yes, I have giant piles of stuff all over my house, but they are not depriving me of joy. Instead, those piles are downright joyous — and heartbreaking. At last count, approximately 20 cardboard and plastic boxes of various sizes block the fireplace, but we live near Miami so who really needs a fireplace anyway? The dining room floor is ringed with the contents of last year’s school backpacks, hastily unloaded the night before the start of the current school year.
To the untrained eye, I would seem an ideal candidate for Kondo-ing. My giant piles of stuff must mean that I am the very definition of a hoarder, the piles a sign of my insanity. You couldn’t be more wrong. I don’t bring new items home every day or compulsively collect anything on sale. In fact, I rarely shop.
Monument to sentiment
My stuff is an accumulation of sentimental souvenirs — defined and finite. Keeping that crap boxed up and untouched is the only thing keeping me sane. Ignoring it enables me to live each day in a state of blissful ignorance.
The rings of backpack contents mark the passage of time. The discarded contents of a third-grade backpack are tangible, encouraging evidence that I did something right to get my youngest to fourth grade. Viewed individually, the piles might seem like useless clutter, but step back and they form a monument and testament to my only concrete accomplishment — that, despite my flawed parenting, my kids survived another year. Kudos to me.
The boxes tell a different tale. Those predate parenthood.
Each and every boxed item is a snapshot of happier times. Shipped directly from the basement of my suburban New York family home after my mom sold the house, they are brimming with my childhood, both the joys and the traumas. They include photos and mementos of my dead father (19 years ago still feels like yesterday), my youth, my care-free college days and grueling grad school grind. They take me back to a time when I had the delusional hope that life would be an only-my-favoritefilling box of chocolates.
Of course, that’s not how life pans out. Friendships fade. Careers change. Marriage is maddening. Kids are a roller coaster of fun and frustration. And people you love die. Opening those boxes would require a reckoning with reality that I can’t psychologically afford: facing failed dreams; dispensing with magical thinking; owning that my career of journalism is akin to chasing a speeding train gone off the rails; reconciling the reality that my life is half over and yet I still have no clue what my purpose is supposed to be.
Maybe if Kondo showed up
I’m not depressed. I have plenty of energy to parent my children, run my household, keep a career afloat, and exercise almost daily. But I do not have the energy to tackle those boxes.
Maybe I’ll have the energy to clear my clutter when the kids are older. When they leave for college. When I have a live-in therapist on the payroll. Maybe if Marie Kondo showed up on my doorstep I’d give in. But most likely my children will inherit the boxes with the house. In lieu of a functioning memory (mine can’t even recall what I had for breakfast), the stuff in those boxes is the only tangible evidence that I was ever here. One day, that stuff will be the only connection my children have to their long-gone mother.
For a brief moment this morning I considered tackling a box — reliving the joys and unpacking the grief. But I had a second cup of coffee instead. I turn 49 years old in April. That’s a lot of boxed baggage I’m not ready to bury. Regrets to my well-meaning friends, but Marie Kondo has no effect on me. I’m not budging an inch on my clutter.
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