Sparking Joy in Tidying up

Hey, so I have been continously been falling sick and my disability has become more apparent. My silence on all my blogs, tidying, k-pop, and otherwise, is not on purpose as I never am able to sit down or type a post or create anymore. I mostly spend my day limping around the house doing chores and ignoring my pain, or lying down in bed in pain.

Am I chronically ill? I don’t know. I do know something is definietly up. What is going on is this: I wake up, beyond exhausted and drained of energy that I am actually incapable of standing up for hours. I physically cannot stand unless assisted or if I eat and have some energy. My legs are in continous pain and I keep getting sick, my body feels like it is on fire, my coughing feels rougher, my bladder is weird. Point is, shit feels awful and I don’t know what to do.

My husband plans on getting me a wheelchair (as I am supposed to be using one) soon, so my productivity will be up and running again, meaning finally I can post and run all my blogs. As for getting continously ill… I don’t know. I am still getting residency here in the States, meaning that I cannot join my husband’s insurance plan. And doing any doctors visits here in the States without any is basically financial suicide. So until I get on insurance or we move to Australia, I won’t be getting it checked out or be getting any “better”.

This hurts to type, all these small symptoms could be something big or something little. I knew all my life I had severely low blood pressure that I would faint easily, due to it running in the family. It hurts not to know nor not to know what to do. It hurts that my family-in-law will brush it aside and tell me to walk it off when I know something is clearly wrong.

Hello everyone!! Since I have much more free time, please tell me what content you’d love from this blog! Ideas I already have are:

1. A tour of my semi-messy room and how I tackle tidying it up using my own method and the KonMari method!

2. A masterlist of tidying up in various rooms of the house and how to tackle certain items.

3. Displaying tidy drawers and rooms you guys submit!

4. How to digitally tidy up AKA: how to go through following blogs, how to clear inboxes for emails, how to tidy up your blog.

It’s been a while since I’ve made a post, and I figured that these tips might be extra helpful with exam season approaching. As someone who struggles a lot with procrastination, I do everything I can to fight the urge to put assignments off until the last minute (even though I’m not always successful). 

Earlier today, I served as the “young woman’s voice” in a panel of local experts at a Girl Scouts speaking event. One question for the panel was something to the effect of, “Should parents read their daughter’s texts or monitor her online activity for bad language and inappropriate content?”

I was surprised when the first panelist answered the question as if it were about cyberbullying. The adult audience nodded sagely as she spoke about the importance of protecting children online.

I reached for the microphone next. I said, “As far as reading your child’s texts or logging into their social media profiles, I would say 99.9% of the time, do not do that.”

Looks of total shock answered me. I actually saw heads jerk back in surprise. Even some of my fellow panelists blinked.

Everyone stared as I explained that going behind a child’s back in such a way severs the bond of trust with the parent. When I said, “This is the most effective way to ensure that your child never tells you anything,” it was like I’d delivered a revelation.

It’s easy to talk about the disconnect between the old and the young, but I don’t think I’d ever been so slapped in the face by the reality of it. It was clear that for most of the parents I spoke to, the idea of such actions as a violation had never occurred to them at all.

Around age 13, I tried to express to my mother that I thought I might have clinical depression, and she snapped at me “not to joke about things like that.” I stopped telling my mother when I felt depressed.

Around age 15, I caught my mother reading my diary. She confessed that any time she saw me write in my diary, she would sneak into my room and read it, because I only wrote when I was upset. I stopped keeping a diary.

Around age 18, I had an emotional breakdown while on vacation because I didn’t want to go to college. I ended up seeing a therapist for - surprise surprise - depression.

Around age 21, I spoke on this panel with my mother in the audience, and afterwards I mentioned the diary incident to her with respect to this particular Q&A. Her eyes welled up, and she said, “You know I read those because I was worried you were depressed and going to hurt yourself, right?”

TL;DR: When you invade your child’s privacy, you communicate three things:

You do not respect their rights as an individual.

You do not trust them to navigate problems or seek help on their own.

You probably haven’t been listening to them.

I had some bad experiences with this. I blocked my parents in all social medias I have.

it’s a long one that covers all areas of life so grab a cup of coffee or tea and dive in! i’ve wanted to write this for a while.

we’ll start with the things that i did that actually stick to Marie Kondo’s method (and yes, this did all begin with me + all episodes of the netflix special). this is what i did and how i went about it/how it went. 

sort clothing - this started out difficult then got very easy. my first goal was to be able to have everything fit in my drawers without being piled around my bed, on top of things, and just strewn around. i got rid of a lot of old ankle socks, and arranged my underwear drawer with dividers and a little box so that everything looks really nice and is easy to find. for the rest of the drawers the goal was to have just one layer of clothing with everything folded the konmari way. i noticed i was holding on to a lot of clothing that made me uncomfortable or had weird associations from times in my life. it was weird, like it didn’t make me happy, it made me anxious, but i didn’t want to let it go? i got rid of pants i liked but did not fit me properly. i got rid of race shirts and “sleep shirts” because i really only need a couple of those. i enjoy the feeling of knowing what clothes are in my drawer and being able to want to wear any of those things.

Hello! I’ve wanted to make a post for a while now about the top KonMari tips that helped me to organize my study space and my living space. So here are the tips that work best for me.

If you don’t know what the KonMari method is, or who Marie Kondo is, she is basically a tidying guru and has helped people around the world tidy their homes. I highly recommend her books. Her method isn’t like any I’ve ever read about and it actually works. I recommend that you try the full method. This is just a breakdown of her method in my own words. The most basic of the basics you could say.

1. Throw away everything that doesn’t spark joy

This is the defining feature of the KonMari method. Throw away anything that doesn’t make you happy. You have to touch them and hold them and ask yourself if they make you happy or in her words, “spark joy.” If they don’t, throw them away, if they do, keep them. This way, at the end, you should end up with things that only make you happy. The recommended order is

Clothes

Books

Papers

Komono (Miscellaneous)

Sentimental Items

2. Designate a spot for everything

This is probably the tip that helped me the most. She advises you to make a home for everything and make sure that items are returned to their homes after they are used. I find that after I only have items that spark joy, using this method is extremely helpful in keeping my space clutter free.

3. Make things easy to access

Keeping storage simple instead of having fancy-schmancy storage has been really helpful. It made things easier to get and put away which in turn, made me put things away in their proper place more instead of just leaving it out because I didn’t want to go through the trouble.