Sorting Through the Boxes

How to Marie Kondo your brain

I didn’t anticipate starting the year by Marie Kondo-ing my brain.

Did you know that if you’re diagnosed with postpartum preeclampsia five days after giving birth, it can lead to postpartum anxiety? Me neither, but here we are. Enter therapy, or as I’m viewing it: the KonMari Method™ for my mental health.

My first therapist¹ explained it like this: we all have boxes shoved in the backs of closets that need to be sorted. Most of the time, you can get away with not touching them, but sometimes those boxes spill out and are no longer neatly packed away. When that happens, you need therapy.

So here I am, less than a month into the new year, and we’re sorting through some messy boxes. How does one Marie Kondo their brain? By following her six rules of tidying up, of course.²

1. Commit Yourself to Tidying Up

Therapy is not something you can give half yourself to—it’s a full commitment. Do I have the time, space, and capacity to invest in this right now?³ Not really, but I also don’t have a choice. The triage system that is my life has determined that this is the top priority. It will be messy, painful, and exhausting. I will have to extend grace to myself and rely heavily on my support network to fill in the gaps. It’s humbling work, but as Marie reminds us, “The effort will be worth it in the end.”⁴

2. Imagine Your Ideal Lifestyle

Free and light. I want to be able to open the closet and not be overwhelmed by all the mess. I want to be able to walk through life without worrying that something someone says or something that happens will cause the rubble in there to spill out. There can be reminders of pain—I don’t think they go away—but I want them to be small and contained. I want the tools to keep them in their place.

3. Finish Discarding First

As much as I wish I could throw away all the traumatic events in my life like the piles of trash they are, that is not how brains work. Instead, I get to walk through them with my therapist and learn from them. What did they teach me—whether erroneously or truthfully—about myself and others? What parts of them are affecting me the most and contributing to my anxiety? It’s only by processing those memories with a therapist that I will be able to let them go healthily.

4. Tidy by Category, Not by Location

While it would be easy to only focus on the inciting trauma that sparked my anxiety, the reality is that I’m plagued by more than just that one event. Because of rule number one, I’ve determined to try to work through as many traumatic events as possible. I know this will be a marathon, and I may regret this decision, but I want to try. Years ago, when I went to therapy to work through my parents’ divorce, I thought that would be enough. It helped, but it wasn’t all of it, and I could tell that the enemy just moved from one thing to another to hinder my life.

Yes, I can talk about my parents’ divorce without crying. No, I no longer fear men in authority over me because of my dad. Yes, I can engage with God’s love in a truly deep way without it being marred by my experience of a father’s love. Those are great things. But there is more to be free from, and I’m not interested in just working on the “2024: my mom almost died, and my sister did die” room. I want to gather all the traumas and deal with them.

5. Follow the Right Order

This is why I am working with a professional. The way you heal matters. As easy as it would be to talk and pray through these things with my community at church, I need real professional help. I need someone who knows what they are doing and can guide me through this process. When I had my intake call with my therapist, and I shared the most traumatic thing in my life, she let me know I wasn’t the first person to disclose that kind of trauma to her. Relief flooded me. The thing in my life that fills me with the most shame and confusion was not new to her. That gave me the confidence in her abilities to help me productively walk through my mess.

6. Ask Yourself If It Sparks Joy

The reality is, not much in therapy will spark joy. But I can look for little sparks of joy in my daily life. I can hold onto goodness like the anchor it is. Things that have sparked joy this week include:

• Snow that looks like diamonds falling from the sky.⁵

• Being nap-trapped by my daughter.

• My son improving on his independent potty skills.⁶

• Friends reading my mind and bringing me the exact dinner I wanted for my meal train.

• Watching my son learn through curiosity and play.⁷

• Snuggles with my husband after long days.

• Fernando Mendoza interviews.⁸

• Toddlerisms.⁹

• My friend’s brownies.

• Dancing to ABBA.

I could not have anticipated this start to 2026. I have no idea what to expect in the months to come. I imagine they will be equally painful and productive—sorting through boxes is like that— but I cannot wait for the results.

If you’ve ever watched Tidying Up with Marie Kondo or any other home organization show, you know how incredible the before-and-afters are. While my anxiety will unfortunately not be solved in a tidy forty-five minutes like a tv show, I do have hope that this year I’ll make significant progress.

So here’s to the unexpected, sort of unwanted, and unpredictable next chapter in my life. Here’s hoping it won’t be too bad, right?

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Anticipate."

1. She was the therapist at the OB’s office and was there to help with my acute anxiety, but we realized pretty quickly I needed someone more long-term.

2. Read about them here.

3. Reader, I definitely do not. I’m a mom of two (one is an infant) who also runs her own business—life is chaos.

4. See note 1 above.

5. I wish I had taken a photo; it was phenomenal.

6. Only took seven months, but he can now take himself to the potty unprompted with underwear and pants on! Before this week, he’d wait too long and pee himself on the way to the potty, but we’re finally noticing soon enough to not have an accident!

7. We’ve been matching animals he has with their countries of origin on his atlas, and he thinks it’s so fun.

8. This made me laugh out loud.

9. My son calls his sister a “raspberry creature,” and I still don’t know what it means, but it makes me laugh every time.