I like reading feng shui and decluttering books because they make me feel like I’m doing something to clean up the mess and chaos of my life. It’s like buying vitamins and feeling good that you’re doing something for your health, but forgetting to take the vitamins. Or feeling virtuous about a fridge full of fresh vegetables that you never get around to cooking. I prefer to sit around reading about storage solutions and ambitious decluttering plans than to address the reality of my overstuffed disordered messy life.

I’ve read a bunch of decluttering books and none of them helped me do it. After I read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing I went through every item of clothing in the house and ended up dropping off 18 black sacks of clothes at the school for their fundraiser. I didn’t even know we had 18 black sacks worth of clothing in the house, let alone items I would be happy to get rid of.

I would love to write about why this book worked, but I don’t know and I’m not sure I want to know. There’s something magical about this book and like any mysterious magic I’m not sure it pays to examine it too closely.

I will write about my KonMari project though. After my initial crazy clothing purge I got sidetracked (as I frequently do) and never worked through the remaining categories of stuff in my home. I would love to though. The KonMari method is the only decluttering method which has ever worked for me.