My Bookish Life: Tidying Up – energetic clothing

“Arrange your clothes so that they rise to the right.”

Being the weirdo that I am, I already had an organizational system to my closet down to the colour-coded hangers. That’s right, each clothing category had its own colour of hanger so I could immediately go to that section depending on what I wanted to wear. Each section was always in the same order and within that subsection the clothing was arranged by colour from dark to light.

However, my clothing does not and will not rise to the right as suggested by Marie Kondo. The reason for this is because my closet sucks.

My Bookish Life: Tidying Up – learning how to declutter

As we grow older, many of us say how school didn’t teach us how to be functioning adults. We never use some of the things we were forced to learn and there are so many things we wished we learned (doing taxes, changing a tire), that we needed a class called “Life”. Kondo says the same for tidying; it is something we have to do as humans but no one ever shows us how to do it and that is why our homes get so cluttered.

“Our parents demanded that we clean up our rooms, but they too had never been trained how to do that. When it comes to tidying, we are all self-taught.”

From personal experience I was constantly grounded for having a disorganized room. At one point my mom actually took both my brother’s and my things and threw them all outside because she couldn’t stand the clutter.

My Bookish Life: Tidying Up – back to the future

“When you put your house in order,
you put your affairs and your past in order too.”

I am currently in a state of transition. I have just moved from overseas back into my parents’ home until I can find my own apartment. I haven’t even decided what city I want to live in yet, but have intended to base it on what kind of job I can get where. In the meantime, I am basically homeless, unemployed, and have an insane number of belongings that need to be dealt with.

All of the stuff I had collected over the past twenty years were weighing me down and holding me back from the life I truly wanted to lead. I had basically run away to another country in order to escape them! Though it took a while, I am finally ready to let go of my past so I can achieve the future I wish to live.

Book Review: The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo

SYNOPSIS: Despite constant efforts to declutter your home, do papers still accumulate like snowdrifts and clothes pile up like a tangled mess of noodles? Japanese cleaning consultant Marie Kondo takes tidying to a whole new level, promising that if you properly simplify and organize your home once, you’ll never have to do it again. With detailed guidance for determining which items in your house “spark joy” (and which don’t), this will help you clear your clutter and enjoy the unique magic of a tidy home –and the calm, motivated mindset it can inspire.

Bookish Thoughts: Strategies of Discarding

There were some stand-out quotes and ideas from the book “The Art of Discarding: how to get rid of clutter and find joy” by Nagisa Tatsumi that did not fit in with my review format, so I decided to make my perusal of this text into a mini-series. For this post I will be listing Tatsumi’s decluttering suggestions and discussing my thoughts on their effectiveness.