On page 126 of “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” there’s a ruthless piece of advice: “Dispose of everything.” Here is the story of how that chapter led me back to a story written 16 years ago… before making its handwritten pages vanish forever.

There is a subtle, beautiful irony in the way certain stories decide to surface again, especially when Marie Kondo enters the picture.

About sixteen years ago, my life was defined by sleepless nights. When the world was asleep and the silence grew deep, I had only two ways to let my thoughts flow: picking up a pencil to draw, or writing.

I still remember when, exploring Scotland on Google Maps during one of those late nights, I fell head over heels in love with Inverness: its mist, its atmosphere, that quiet, mysterious charm. It was there that I planted the very first seed of what, years later, would become the Áetheria saga.

At first, I wrote on my computer, but soon enough the keyboard felt too rigid, too heavy, lacking the freedom I truly needed. So, I switched to notebooks. Stack upon stack of notebooks filled by hand, in pencil, between the shadows and the quiet of the night.

Then, life changed its pace. Other priorities took over, time became scarce, and those notebooks ended up at the bottom of a storage box, forgotten for years.

The Rediscovery and the “Trap” on Page 126
A few years ago, I bought Marie Kondo’s book box set, starting with The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, to declutter my home and let go of the unnecessary. Opening those old boxes was only supposed to be about clearing space, but then… amidst the dust, there they were: my old notebooks.

Re-reading them felt like a jolt to the heart. I saw the version of myself from sixteen years ago and felt the raw passion of writing purely out of a fundamental need to tell a story. That story grabbed hold of me once again, with a force I could no longer ignore. I sat down at my computer and transcribed every single word, page by page.

And that’s when the “trap” was sprung.

On page 126 of the book, in the chapter dedicated to organizing papers, Marie Kondo states very clearly: “When dealing with papers, the rule of thumb is to dispose of them all.” Swept up in the momentum of decluttering, and knowing that everything was now safe and sound on my computer, I did the most drastic thing an author could do: I took all the original notebooks and threw them away.

Yes, I destroyed the handwritten proof of my own novel!

The Lesson Behind the Tidying
Back then, I had no idea I would ever publish The Shadows of Áetheria. To me, it was just a logical cleanup: the text was safe on my PC, and the physical papers were taking up space. Today, if I could turn back time, I would take those notebooks and place them lovingly inside a box to keep forever.

To bear witness to that past, fortunately, I still have old backup files dating back to 2009, files that document my earliest drafts and fragments of stories born during that time.

And yet, thinking back, if I hadn’t opened that Marie Kondo book and gone hunting through those boxes to tidy up, Áetheria would still be down there, in the dark.

The paper pages are gone, it’s true. But the story was alive: it just needed someone to dust it off so it could find its way back into the light.

Have you ever let go of something precious in the heat of trying to make space? Tell me about it in the comments!