That was the day I emptied every closet, cupboard, and drawer in my apartment and dumped the contents onto the floor of each room. This was a few months before Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up hit bookshelves in North America, but the method was essentially the same. The neat and tidy home I’d always lived in was no more. I was left standing in a mess I didn’t recognize, yet every item in it belonged to me. Staring at it all, I was overwhelmed with the task I had just created for myself. What have I done? When you make a mess of that size, though, you have no choice but to
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