Alternative Marie Kondo method for chronic illness -

Hey everybody!

Wow I cannot get a hold of my fatigue at the moment, and I think anyone who has the same issue will understand my problem. You see not too long ago a woman gained fame on Netflix for her show about decluttering and she is Marie Kondo! The problem I found was the Marie Kondo method is not really practical when you live with chronic illness and especially chronic fatigue. So, I had to come up with an alternative Marie Kondo method for chronic illness!

Chronic fatigue is something that is very hard to deal with because people think it is just feeling tired so they assume if we have a nap everything will be ok. However, this is not true fatigue feels a lot more like the lack of strength that comes with the flu and no amount of rest makes any difference!

Any kind of activity has a big kick back and it is very hard to organise and keep on top of housework when your body is shaking from being so exhausted! I was a nurse before I got sick, and honestly even doing night shifts never felt as tired as I do from just dusting half of my living room.

So, when I saw Marie Kondo’s series I was inspired and wanted to have a clear out and get on top of organising my home. Organisation can greatly help those of us with chronic fatigue because it means we use less energy looking for things that we need. I saw how this method worked and knew that it would help both my energy and the energy in my home.

The fault in the method is that you take each type of object in your home, starting with clothing, books, kitchen, paper etc and put it all in one place. She says to start with clothing and to take every piece of yours and put it on your bed, then you take each one and think does this give me joy? If it doesn’t then you thank it and put it to recycle or donate.

I had already been through my clothes, so I skipped that and jumped into pulling everything out and oh my goodness was that a mistake! Because pulling things out takes up more than my day’s allowance of energy, I found the house was so cluttered with stuff everywhere! Piles of things to donate and things waiting to be put away and the house was 100 times worse than when I started!

My mistake was that I was trying to follow the method exactly instead of tailoring it to what I can do, I had become too enthusiastic! After feeling so overwhelmed that nothing got done for months, I realised that I needed to make some changes, so here is my…

Alternative Marie Kondo Method:

Divide your home into small sections that you can personally manage like a drawer at a time for example
Take it slow there is no rush to finish the whole house organising in a couple of weeks
Listen to your body and rest as often as you need
Bring things to where you can go through them comfortably like bringing a drawer over to where you sit so you will not be sat in a painful position
Make sure to put things for donation and things for recycling in bags right away save making a messy pile of things that you have to clean up
Get rid of the donation and recycling items before starting the next part of the process this way you will not have bags of things everywhere getting in the way
Ask for help, if you are feeling overwhelmed or struggling don’t be afraid to ask for help from a friend or family member
Get small boxes to use for organising the things you keep from charity shops or discount shops because this can become an expensive part of the process if you are not careful

Lastly, I just want to say that Marie Kondo is a healthy woman, don’t compare yourself to her and do your best that’s all you can do. This alternative Marie Kondo method for chronic illness is still a work in progress but if you have any tips and tricks please leave them in the comments.

Namaste xxx