Declutter Your Magic: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (Show Preview)

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Here's a partial transcript of my Konmari episode:

You’re listening to Stella Speaks, a podcast about bitchcraft. We brew feminism, witchcraft, social justice issues, and profanity together in the cauldron and see what bubbles up. I hope you stay for a spell. Today’s podcast is about applying Marie Kondo’s “KonMari” method  of tidying up to your life and witchcraft. There is some light discussion of diet culture and disordered eating patterns toward the end of this episode; those times are noted for you in the description of the podcast so that you can skip over that section if that would be good for your mental health today.

This podcast is recorded on the illegally occupied ancestral land of the Erie, Kaskaskia, and Mississauga people in northeast Ohio. Go to native-land.ca to look up the land you occupy. More information about land acknowledgements as well as an orientation to this season is available; go to the podcast titled “Listen First: Declutter Your Magic Introduction,” a trailer episode posted April 19, 2023

The Konmari method of tidying is outlined in Marie Kondo’s books. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. First published in Japan in 2010, the book was a New York Times bestseller, selling millions of copies worldwide in 2014. It became a phenomenon - people all over the world were decluttering under her system, and, of course, many merely read the book and thought about organizing. In 2019, a one season Netflix series featuring Kondo going into American homes and leading participants through her tidying method brought the method to even more people’s attention. In addition to the first book, Kondo has also written Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up and Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life. A manga version of the first book called The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying Up. Kondo is not just a writer now; she’s a brand. There are KonMari branded storage items for sale at The Container Store, and she offers a certification for consultants in her method that you can complete online for just under $3000.

I read the book but didn’t implement it right away. I completed what Kondo calls a “tidying festival” in her follow up book Spark Joy in 2017-18. It was life-changing.  I was a middle school English teacher at the time, and I Konmaried my clothing starting in the winter break of 2017 and finished in 2018. It was magical, and it did change my life.

I talked in the last season about how in 2019 a Mars ritual was the catalyst for me getting the courage to leave my first husband, When I look at the tidying festival, I can see the beginning of my process of realizing that my marriage wasn’t fulfilling. My first husband was very tidy and organized in his way, but he did not support my decluttering and found it very distressing. I think his intuition was right ont; in the process of discarding items in my home that didn’t “spark joy” I did eventually come to the conclusion that my marriage was something that did not spark joy, It took some literal magic to be the catalyst for me leaving, but the process of curating my belongings down to only things that I truly enjoyed and loved did teach me to trust my intuition and built some decision making muscles in my spirit.

In The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Kondo mentions some of her clients’ transformations. After putting their belongings in order, things shift. People leave careers, go to school, get married, and yes, get divorced. My personal theory is that when you get rid of things you don’t need, you open up space and energy for new experiences and people in your life. I also think that as you hone your sensitivity to what sparks joy for you, you develop trust and confidence in yourself. 

If you are interested in decluttering your life, I recommend that you read both The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and Spark Joy all the way through before beginning your tidying festival. The books go in order of her category system, but there are lots of little tips and tricks about the entire process throughout. If you try to read a chapter and then follow the instruction for the category, you will miss out on wisdom that comes later. Both books have audio available, and both were readily available to me via the Libby app. Libby is a library app for digital downloads of ebooks and audiobooks; if you have a library card in the USA, it is very possible that you have access to Libby. It’s in over 22,000 libraries. Read both books all the way through first or work with a certified consultant. Spark Joy goes into some helpful details especially about sharpening your sensitivity to joy and how to handle items like hammers and mops that might not seem to “spark joy.”

The basic process is that Kondo wants you to have a perfect, life-altering, shocking transformation in a short period of time to shake up your system and convert you into a tidy person. She first has you visualize your ideal life, and then you begin your tidying festival all in one shot. She suggests that you finish quickly, completing a full decluttering and organizing within six months. You go through categories of belongings; you do not declutter by location. So instead of starting with the bedroom, then bathroom, then living room, and so on, you go through specific categories in a specified order: first clothes, then books, then papers, then “komono” a Japanese word we would probably translate to “miscellany” and finally memorabilia. For the average person, this means that you start with the easiest category (clothes) and move to the most difficult (memorabilia.) You don’t worry about organizing everything until all of the decluttering is done; you can put things away into temporary homes so that your stuff isn’t out all over, but treat those spots as temporary. Once you are down to only items that you want to keep, then you organize.

This is an intuitive process, not an intellectual one. Kondo doesn’t say to discard something if you haven’t used it in a year the way that some organizers do. She doesn’t have you set a number of how many belongings to keep (one exception is a section in Spark Joy about keeping a limited number of plastic shopping bags in which you set a limit.) Kondo is not a minimalist, either. The only criteria for keeping an item is when you take it into your hand does it spark joy? For example, when you KonMari your clothing, you bring every single piece of clothing into one spot in the house. Then you individually pick up each item of clothing, press it to your body if necessary, and notice your reaction. Does it spark joy? If it does, you keep it. If it doesn’t, you discard it, saying thank you for all that the item did for you. 

For witches, I think that this is a useful framework. Before my tidying festival, I had a lot of extraneous materials in my life that crowded my energy. As far as specifically magical items, most would be categorized as “komono” or memorabilia, though witches often have large book collections as well. I had a lot of little items that had magical potential but that I didn’t use; they were rehomed with witches who were happy to have them. I used to save a ton of memorabilia; little bits from public rituals, programs from festivals, witchy business cards–no longer. I do hold onto pretty much all yoga- or witchcraft-related books as a resource for my community. I have them all cataloged on a website called LibraryThing, and witchy friends can borrow them…