How Marie Kondo Changed My Life

“The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up” is a book that, according to a few of its 3,000 five-star Amazon reviews, is no less than a “life-changing” “breath of fresh air and positive energy” that “brings peace to your life and mind.” Written by charmingly obsessive Japanese organizer Marie Kondo—who was crowned one of Time’s most influential people of 2015 and has sold 2 million books—it promises much more than a tidy home: Kondo purports to leave each reader calmer, more decisive and yes, perhaps even skinnier.

While even the casual self-helper is no stranger to this siren song of results (The Secret, anyone?), Kondo’s book is unusual in that it has earned sensible peoples’ stamps of approval, notably inspiring a few of my non-gushy friends to gush about how the book has changed their lives.

So would it change mine? I set out to find out.

The main thing to know about Kondo’s KonMari method is that it majors on purging. Kondo believes that it’s impossible to stay calm and content if you have too many things. So she advises purging as follows:

1. Envision the life you want to have, post-tidying, and rationalize how having less stuff will help you get there.
2. Gather all items in one category of things and spread them out on the floor. For clothes, for instance, this means scouring your home for every last jacket, winter sock, ski coat and bathing suit, and amassing them all in one place before even thinking about sorting.

3. Touch each item and ask yourself whether it brings you joy. Place things that don’t bring you joy into a trash bag to be given away.
4. Repeat, moving from the workaday (clothing) to the sentimental (photos, letters). There’s also some folding and light feng shui involved.

And so I spent two days doing just this, beginning by conjuring a vague aspirational lifestyle centered on more calm and way less forgetting of keys. I then filled my bedroom floor with every piece of clothing I own: the contents of my closet and chest of drawers, the jackets from the hooks in the hall and the suitcase of winter things I keep hidden away (Kondo doesn’t believe in storing seasonal clothes separately). Faced with heaps of tops, skirts and coats, I felt a desperation to cull that I don’t get when leafing through hangers in my closet.

In the past, I’ve cut down on clothes and accessories by asking myself whether I’d worn things in six months, or trying everything on to see whether things really fit or looked good on me. But asking whether a piece sparked joy left me with what I really wanted all along: a closet of things I actually like wearing.

To my guilty Catholic brain, the best part was Kondo’s instruction to think about what every piece you’re ditching has brought you—such as the pleasure of buying it, or learning about how you shop or what suits you—so that nothing feels wasted. I personally realized that the relative calm of the Zara in London’s Gatwick Airport leads me to open my wallet for things I’ll never wear, such as a pair of cheap white-viscose wide-leg trousers and an oversized, acid-wash denim jacket. I found that my love for Cos only really extends to things that are A-line, that I don’t feel comfortable in clothes that veer too far from classic cuts, and that I haven’t worn anything but basic jewelry in a year—and yet I had enough chintzy clip-on earrings and rusting bejeweled statement necklaces to fill a tote bag.

By the time I’d gone through every category of belonging, I’d rid my apartment of eight trash bags of clothes, accessories, electronics and linens. I folded my remaining jeans, sweaters and underwear into drawers vertically so I could see everything at once, and I hung my closet from longest (on the left) to shortest (on the right), which made putting things away more intuitive (and which Kondo said would turn me optimistic). A formerly overflowing linen cabinet became just short of orderly, and for perhaps the first time in my life, I knew where all my plugs and cables lived, and what they were for.

The cull also temporarily transformed me into something of a ruthless monster. When my husband arrived home hours into my first day of Kondo-ing and found me frenetically filling trash bags with sheets, blankets and towels, he asked me to please cool it and coerced me into keeping an extra blanket and some hand towels, which Kondo likely wouldn’t have sanctioned. I also willfully disobeyed some of her other dictates. She’s unyielding on the need to throw away books, for instance, and yet I kept my piles of paperbacks because I like forcing them upon houseguests to spur future book chats. And since I actually laughed out loud when I read what she does right when she gets home—a process that involves removing every last receipt, key, notebook and train pass from her purse and putting each thing in its own place around her home—I didn’t even try to do anything of the sort.

In the days that followed my purge, I felt a Gwyneth level of lifestyle smugness that manifested itself in spiralized cucumber for dinner and an 8 am Saturday exercise class. A month post-Konmari, I’m not doing much spiralizing or exercising, but it’s been shockingly easy to keep my things hung, folded and organized. And my life has certainly changed. Making hundreds of decisions helped me precisely define my likes and dislikes, I feel comfortable in every piece of clothing I wear, and I’ve been much less susceptible to impulse buys. But while Kondo seems to spend much of her down time sipping green tea in silent reflection, even after my tidy I prefer straight-to-Netflix rom coms and pretzel M&Ms. (Suffice it to say I haven’t lost weight.) Still, I think she’d be heartened by an unprompted comment from my husband this week: “Our apartment has seemed calmer lately, don’t you think?”

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