hoarding – Sheryl Kirby

More Thoughts on Marie Kondo… and Sheet Folding

I’ve now watched all of the episodes of the Marie Kondo series on Netflix, and I’ve been reading many of the reviews and articles that the show has spawned in the media, and there are a few things that are just not jiving with me…

In the de-cluttering of a whole house, there seems to be a lot of emphasis on folding clothes and arranging stuff in drawers — how is it that everything beyond clothes, books, papers, and sentimental items falls into one category? Spices, power tools, and computer cables are all together? This is the case in Kondo’s books as well, and it always felt weird to me, especially since people tend to buy things like cosmetics and food with a similar “instant gratification” mentality that they have to clothes and books.
Perhaps there’s more that we’re missing in the process, due to editing of the video, but de-cluttering is, first and foremost, based on hard logic. Does this fit? If not, get rid of it. Does it need repairs, re-dying, or a complete overhaul to be usable and is there a reasonable expectation that the person will actually make those repairs? Will it honestly be used again (for instance a book that was read once and not particularly enjoyed)? I didn’t really see this process, nor did Kondo really seem to promote it, favouring her “spark joy” philosophy that really allows people to keep all the broken, ripped, faded, ratty, and useless crap in their lives just because they still love it.
Kondo has softened her “just get rid of it stance” a bit for the series, with many reviews emphasizing the fact that she seems pretty laid back about not judging people for their stuff or wanting to keep it. There’s nothing wrong with this, but it’s not exactly the same sentiment the book was based on.
The idea of expressing gratitude to your belongings can seem a bit kooky at first, but it’s actually something we should be doing all the time, not just as we’re getting rid of an item. This is far easier to do when you are able to pare your belongings down to things that you love using or having around you, so you experience joy every day because of the things in your life.
I screamed out loud in horror as I watched Kondo put a fitted sheet on the floor in order to demonstrate how to fold it. What the actual fucking fuck? Two thoughts immediately came into my head during this segment; first, generations of mothers and grandmothers making that “tsk” noise, both at Kondo’s placing a clean sheet on the floor (!!!) and the fact that most people don’t know how to fold a fitted sheet; and second, could I somehow turn this into an opportunity to offer classes to teach people how to properly fold a fitted sheet (that didn’t involve throwing it on the floor, or using a flat surface at all… Yes, I can actually do this. Yes, I am a witch). My method involves a puppet show, if that helps…
In the spirit of Miriam (“Don’t say ‘like’, dear, it makes you look ignorant”) Margoyles, I would like to offer a language de-cluttering course. I would offer this for free to the woman in episode one, who dropped 4 or 5 “likes” into every sentence. Cluttered speech is as bad as a cluttered home.
De-cluttering is well and good but would be mostly unnecessary if people didn’t feel the need to buy so much stuff in the first place. Folding shirts nicely in response to a shopaholic/hoarding problem is a bit like sticking a band-aid on a sucking chest wound. Dealing with the psychological why of accumulation doesn’t make for terribly enthralling TV, of course, unless you hired someone to follow the shopaholic to the mall and jump out at them from behind the sales racks yelling, “You don’t need that, Barb! You know you don’t need that! Put it back!” (Yes, you’re damned right I want to host this show.)
I was also a bit disappointed at the follow-up in terms of what the guests were meant to do with their stuff once they decided it no longer sparked joy. Some episodes showed participants dropping off items at local charities, but not all. And there was no point in Kondo’s sorting process, in any of the episodes, where we clearly saw participants sorting stuff into sections of donate/trash/sell. I presume this did happen, but it should have been more prominent. (And the guy with the massive collection of sneakers could likely have sold many of the pairs in his collections as “vintage” and made back some of the $10,000 of debt he accumulated buying all those sneakers he never wore.)

I binge-watched most of the series one afternoon when I was immobilized by a migraine, and it mostly left me feeling really dissatisfied. To be fair, I did go refold all the clothes in my dresser drawers, but I don’t feel that Kondo’s system is truly comprehensive in terms of a start-to-finish whole-house purge that deals with both the reasons for the clutter and what to do with the stuff you’re getting rid of.

And I’m happy to demonstrate to her how to properly fold a fitted sheet while standing up anytime she’d like to learn.

Does Retail Therapy Equate a Visit to a Sex Worker?

Hear me out.

Like half the Western world, I spent New Year’s Day glued to Netflix watching the Marie Kondo series. Not because I have any kind of New Year’s resolution to get organized — seriously, Marie Kondo wishes her house was as organized as mine — but out of sheer curiosity.

Known for her books and YouTube tutorials, the organizing expert has a new series on NetFlix that isn’t that far off from those old episodes of Hoarders. She drops by, gasps at people’s mountains of stuff, tells them to throw away anything that doesn’t “spark joy”, and then returns a few days later to see how they’re getting along.

We only watched one episode, one called “Empty Nesters”, a couple in late middle-age who live in a house that had belonged to one of their families and in which more than three generations worth of belongings had been amassed. But it was clear that most of the clutter actually belonged to the couple in question. Dad had walls full of boxes of baseball cards, and Mom was a collector of Christmas decorations and, like many people with shopping/hoarding habits, a good three or four closets full of clothing.

In one of the interview segments, she revealed that she indulged in “retail therapy” on occasions when she was angry at her husband; that going to the mall and spending money was her way of getting back at him for whatever transgression had occurred.

As she cleaned out her closet and piled everything together — Kondo’s system requires participants to amass everything of one type of item (clothes, books, etc.) in one place before beginning to sort — it was clear that the client had piles of clothing still bearing the original tags. As she went through the mountain of garments, she tried on recently purchased clothes that didn’t even fit her properly. Why would someone buy something that wasn’t the correct size?

She claimed to like all the clothes she had amassed, but this caused her to have a hard time organizing and disposing of items, as everything that we saw her sort through seemed to “spark joy” for her. (Psst… “spark joy” is not the same as “I like this, it’s nice.”)

But let’s go back to her comment about her shopping being some kind of revenge on her husband. Now, to be clear, there was no allusion or insinuation of her husband hiring sex workers. It wasn’t that kind of revenge. But she obviously wanted something pretty and cheap to fill some kind of void or assuage her hurt or anger. For roughly the same amount of money a man would spend on a sexual encounter, she could do a haul at the mall. She came home with clothing that didn’t fit and didn’t suit her personal style (which is mostly the case when hiring a sex worker; it’s about fantasy, not reality) and that mostly appeared to be throw-away fast fashion items — there was no evidence of some hardcore spending on Birkin bags or Dior gowns — and I suspect that once she got the things home, she felt guilty and didn’t want to face having to return them, so they got jammed into her over-packed closets and ignored or forgotten about.

The whole process was more about the actual shopping and buying than any intention of keeping and wearing. The joy, the high, the mental and emotional orgasm, as it were, occurred in the store as she was handing over the cash or credit card.

It made me joke that every mall entrance should have one of those clothing charity bins, so that people making “retail therapy”-style purchases of things that they knew they didn’t actually want or need could just shove the stuff into the donation bin on the way to their car, and never have to take the guilt-inducing garments home at all.

Note that I’m not knocking sex workers; they provide an important service. And while there are obviously sex workers with clients who visit them regularly, a lot of the encounters are fairly anonymous. There’s no commitment involved after the fact, just as with shopping addicts/clothes hoarders, there is no level of commitment to the purchases after they are bagged and taken home, especially if they carry the stigma of a purchasing high the person would rather forget.

The whole episode, although especially the clothing segments, made me wonder how we, as a society, had gotten to this point. Because this lady with her clothing hoard is not alone. The show didn’t get into any deep aspect of the why of the client’s clutter, and unlike Hoarders or similar shows where there is a therapist on site, that’s not really Kondo’s schtick, but it makes you wonder why or how it ever got that bad. Does the client have personal issues that need to be addressed by a professional, or is she just typical of a society that buys way too much stuff?

We all make the occasional bad purchase; something didn’t fit the way we thought it would, or it didn’t become as much of a go-to item as we anticipated, but I suggest that three massive closets full of cheap clothing, much of it still with the tags, is indicative that the high and release of handing over cash for a jacket might be similar to the high and release of handing over cash for sex.

Finally, with regards to Kondo’s trademark “spark joy” mantra; while it’s a fantastic catchphrase, I find it somewhat disingenuous when it comes to actual sorting and organizing. Just because you like something, or find it attractive, or even if derive joy from it, doesn’t mean that you have to keep it, or even own it in the first place. I think too many people following Kondo’s system use the sparking of joy as an excuse to keep lots of crap they’d likely be better off without.

Out of the Closet

Some people are naturally pack-rats, saving everything, dragging it with them from home to home throughout their lives. Others though, are purgers, overcome with the need to be free of the stuff they no longer use, need or love.

I’ve never seen the point of keeping “stuff”. Sure, I have a few items that I keep for sentimental reasons, but the overall quantity is small, and the pieces have real meaning. When we moved a few years ago, I took the opportunity to get rid of piles of things I knew I’d never use again – moving to a significantly smaller space, I didn’t have much choice – but I got rid of furniture and CDs and books without regret.

The only thing I sometimes regret purging with such strident rules is clothing.

Moreso than any other item we own, clothing has the power to tug at heartstrings and provoke memories. The dress you wore on a first date, a boyfriend’s favourite comfy sweater. I assume this is why brides spend tens of thousands of dollars on a wedding dress they’ll wear for a few hours and then save it in a special box, long after the marriage has dissolved.

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