Ready. Set. ACTION!

Week Three of The RePressed Reset!

This newsletter is part of an 8-week book study I am hosting for The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. If you’d like to join, you just need to upgrade your subscription to paid and email me. :) Weekly newsletters, a group chat, and live calls are all a part of the book study program for paid subscribers. Happy tidying!

Hello spring cleaning friends!

How are you? How is your week?

I am so sick…again!

I keep getting sick with terrible headaches and 🥴GI probz🥴, def going through something weird right now.

My doctor probably thinks I’m a hypochondriac at this point—that or just a perimenopausal ghoul who’s not afraid to speak up.

I’m sorry for the TMI and delayed newsletter! 😵‍💫

Week Three is exciting because this is where we pause reading for a lil bit and start doing.

Finally! ✨

ACTION!

But before we get into what’s coming for this week, let’s look back at last week’s homework and check in.

• Were you able to visualize your destination and come to your profound why?

• Were you able to figure out where some items might be hiding out of sight?

  • I made sure to pick up an olive green peacoat I recently purchased at American Thrift in Jersey (future field trip?) from the dry cleaner this week that has been there for a while. Regrettably the dry cleaner has become my secondary storage space. 😵‍💫

• Were you faced with a moment this week where you thought, “Oh yeah I definitely have way too many things.”

  • It hit me hard this week when I was rushing around to pick up our apartment before our cleaner came one morning. I was hustling to stuff things into our guest room or my son’s room and then directed our cleaner not to clean those two rooms. Too full. Too messy! I’d love to get to a place where none of the rooms in our place are off-limits for being too cluttered for our cleaner! Yeesh.

• What about your categories? Any ideas on what you may have to separate into a sub-category?

  • I noticed while reading Chapter 3 this week that Marie Kondo goes into more depth about categories. I know I mentioned that I usually create sub-categories for items that have too much volume, and she does tell us to do this as well, however, I personally decided I want to follow her tidying order exactly this time around as a little experiment to see what happens. I’m going to gather everything as she directs and if a sub-category sticks out (e.g. sweaters under the “Tops” category) as being too large, I will separate it out and discard it separately. Basically, instead of pre-meditating my sub-categories this time, I am going to do it on the fly. Let’s see how it goes! I’ll let you know if I decide to pivot the strategy again based on volume. I am not certain every “top” I own will actually fit on my living room floor. 🥴

Now onto Chapter 3!

Let me share a secret. Putting your house in order is fun! The process of assessing how you feel about the things you own, identifying those that have fulfilled their purpose, expressing your gratitude, and bidding them farewell, is really about examining your inner self, a rite of passage to a new life. The yardstick by which you judge is your intuitive sense of attraction, and therefore there’s no need for complex theories or numerical data. All you need to do is follow the right order. So arm yourself with plenty of garbage bags and prepare to have fun. —Marie Kondo (Chapter 3)

Chapter 3 is a long one and it covers a lot of different topics like tidying order, all the different categories, and she even zooms in an explains in detail how to put your clothing and items away according to her method once you have discarded.

I think the best way to tackle this section is to split it up. What I have decided to do is to focus on pages 63 - 99 for now. Right before the section titled “All About Papers,” I decided to stop reading.

But that split is really only for reading purposes to get through the book and absorb all of the information as best as we can to fit into an 8-week book study.

I want you to pause even more fully and start the discarding process this week.

That means you’ll zoom into pages 63-70, before she describes how to put your clothing away.

We can revisit Marie’s folding method (it’s so effective; I have never gone back to the “old” way since I read this book for the first time!) once we’re working with only our beloved items and the discarding process is done or well under way.

I should clarify here that once a category (e.g. Clothing) is fully sorted and discarded, then you can put it away. You do not need to discard every single category (e.g. Clothing, Books, Papers, etc.) before putting items away.

This was unclear to me so I wanted to reiterate that you discard by category, then put it away. Then you move onto the next category—discard, then put away. And so on…

The other thing I want to articulate is that I think reading the words on the page can be a little unbelievable or dare I say—flat.

It’s like, is this really going to “work” ???

And I’m here to say: YES.

IT WORKS!

Tidying exactly as Marie Kondo describes and following her instructions is magical in some way.

Reading the words on the page while glaring up at the ungodly mountain of clothing I have burdened my son’s sweet little bedroom with is downright daunting. I’m not feeling inspired or jazzed or believing in that moment.

BUT…

We must separate our daily life from our “event” of tidying. As Marie Kondo explains earlier in the book, tidying is a special event. It’s not our normal, daily life where we have work and our regular responsibilities. We need to carve out the time and treat it like a special thing.

(Because it is!)

There is something about putting your phone down and gathering every single top you own from your drawers, your closet, maybe your partner’s closet, you car, your storage unit—whatever! and seeing it all in this huge pile, in one place. Something reorients. Working with your hands, being totally present, and focusing on the task at hand without distractions becomes a magical ritual—you’re intentionally connecting with yourself.

I find it very challenging to access my intuition (the only tool we use to figure out what items we want to keep in our lives!) in between work meetings in my day-to-day. However, when I get quiet, do something with my hands, and tap into myself, something different happens.

Your perspective shifts.