Chapter I: In the Beginning

The night before my KonMari purge, I came home to an empty apartment and an overflowed toilet. This was not a benign toilet situation: It was a disgusting, festering, toxic nightmare. A gurgling toilet and an inch of shit water, apparently brought on by no one and nothing, was like the universe saying, Okay, bitch, you wanna clean? Clean this!

In fact, I did want to clean. I wanted to clean a lot. When I purchased tidying icon Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up a few weeks prior, I was in the market for more than an organized room; I was looking for a happier life. I had been stressed, exhausted, and grumpy the moment I got home and walked into my room, which was brimming with so much crap that I couldn’t focus. Luckily, a happier life is exactly what Kondo is selling, with a decluttering approach painstakingly curated to deliver maximum tidiness, and through tidiness, MAXIMUM JOY.

I was ready for MAXIMUM JOY—I mean, sure, yeah, bring it on—but I had serious doubts about my ability to tidy in any revolutionary way.

Why? Because I’m a TLC camera crew away from being a hoarder. I’ve never been able to keep my room clean for more than a day or so. Since I moved to New York in 2013, my living space had become a prison of crap that I chronically neglected. There wasn’t enough room for my stuff. The drawers were stuffed with balled-up clothing, the closet packed tight with hangers, and a hanging shoe rack swung by one hinge so that entire pairs of shoes tumbled to the ground with a slam. I saved every paper from every thing ever. Want to know how much I paid each time I bought toilet paper from Duane Reade? That information was available in the form of thousands of receipts crammed in a shoebox. On my desk chair—which I'd never used—was a mountain of clothes that got so big that the act of extracting a shirt from the stack toppled the entire stack like a Jenga tower. The desk itself was piled with clutter, papers, books, and, for some reason, socks. I was a detective in the ongoing unsolved mystery Where the fuck is my other shoe?

Every six weeks or so, I put everything away to prevent a panic attack, but in a day or two, whatever progress I made had unraveled. Could I, a disgusting clutter demon, become Marie Kondo?

In a word, no, because Marie Kondo is a freak. Her book, a small hardcover guide, expertly details her method of tidying, the ways in which she discovered it, and why all other ways of tidying—or arguments about why you won’t be able to tidy like KonMari—are wrong. The book is alternately cold and highly emotional, practical and insane. She holds beliefs I simply do not have, and while I respect them, I also can’t fake them.

For example, Kondo holds a great deal of respect for the home and honors that by never wearing anything schlubby, even to sleep. “If you are a woman, try wearing something elegant as nightwear,” she suggests. “The worst thing”—emphasis added—”you can do is to wear a sloppy sweat suit.”

I had neglected [talking to my clothes], mostly because it’s dumb. Yet as I gently placed my beloved stripey shirt in the trash bag, I found myself involuntarily thanking it. Thank you, I whispered, like a weirdo witch.

Reading this made me feel as if I was never going to nail the KonMari Method. Not only do I wear a “sloppy sweat suit” to sleep, I wear one outside quite frequently. I wash my hair once a week, eat all foods straight out of their bag or container, wash my sheets approximately never, and have a text thread with myself detailing all the best public bathrooms in which to poop in Manhattan. I’m just a gal who is hustling in New York to make it and, like Whitman, I contain multitudes. Some of these multitudes are very hygenic and respectable. I can tell myself all this, but I still don’t think Marie Kondo would keep me as a pet.

In Kondo’s worldview, “When you’ve finished tidying your home, your life will change dramatically.” Your relationships will improve! Your ambition will thrive! Your career path will clear! And you will have diarrhea. (Seriously.) According to Kondo, the process of tidying your home with the intensity and dedication that the KonMari Method demands can actually create a “detox phenomenon” that can lead to clearer skin, weight loss, and clean-as-a-whistle bowels.