K.C. Davis > Quotes

“her advice for getting things done around the house is useless to me. (She once told me, “I just light a candle and think about how good it will feel to get some things done around the house.” Lol what?)”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“You do not have to care about yourself to care for yourself. So many of us have the cart before the horse here: you think you must first like yourself to start being kind to yourself. It actually works the opposite way: caring for yourself is the greatest tool for learning to care about yourself. So”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“But keeping everything done isn’t the point. Keeping things functional is the point because here’s the thing: it will look like that again tomorrow only if I clean it today.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Interestingly enough, the subtle shift from obligation to option created motivation for me.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Framing it as kindness instead of failure was the key to being able to wake up and choose to get things done the next day.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“you can’t save the rain forest if you’re depressed”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Because you must know, dear heart, that you are worthy of care whether your house is immaculate or a mess.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“marie Kondo says to tri-fold your underwear. The admiral swears making your bed will change your life. Rachel Hollis thinks the key to success is washing your face and believing in yourself. Capsule wardrobes! Rainbow-colored organization! Bullet journals! How many of these have we tried? How many did we stick with? If you’re like me, the answer is probably none.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“But sometimes the “right” way of doing something creates barriers for certain executive functioning skills.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising

“Try writing down your various care tasks and isolating the functional reason for doing each of them.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“You don’t exist to serve your space; your space exists to serve you. Internalizing this belief will help you a) shift your perspective of care tasks from a moral obligation to a functional errand, b) see what changes you actually want to make, and c) weave them into your life with minimal effort, relying not on self-loathing but on self-compassion.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“In conclusion: being messy is not a moral failing, tidy is simply a preference, organization is functional, and you deserve to function.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising

“Although men may struggle with completing care tasks, they are less likely to receive the message from society that they are not worthy of love or not valid as a human if they are not good at these tasks.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising

“In my work as a therapist I have seen hundreds of clients who struggle with these issues, and I am convinced now more than ever of one simple truth: they are not lazy. In fact, I do not think laziness exists. You know what does exist? Executive dysfunction, procrastination, feeling overwhelmed, perfectionism, trauma, amotivation, chronic pain, energy fatigue, depression, lack of skills, lack of support, and differing priorities. ADHD, autism, depression, traumatic brain injury, and bipolar and anxiety disorders are just some of the conditions that affect executive function, making planning, time management, working memory, and organization more difficult, and tasks with multiple steps intimidating or boring.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“For a lot of people, finding a method that bypasses the most executive functioning barriers or that makes a task a little less intolerable is better than what’s “quickest.” In the end, the approach that you are motivated to do and enjoy doing is the most “efficient,” because you are actually doing it and not avoiding”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“If care tasks are morally neutral, then having not showered or brushed your hair in three weeks does not mean “I am disgusting” but instead simply means “I am having a hard time right now.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“What is one thing you could do for yourself today that would be truly enjoyable for tomorrow you?”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“How do we respond when someone criticizes the state of our home or tries to “help” us by giving advice that doesn’t really fit? My favorite phrase for well-meaning family is, “I know you want to see me in a functioning environment and I want you to know that I want that for myself also. I am on my own journey to find what works for me and what I need most from you is nonjudgmental support. One thing that could really help me right now is ________.” And then give them a tangible task they can do! “Take these bags of clothes to the donation bin,” “sit with me while I clean my room,” “help me call a cleaning service or make a doctor’s appointment.” Sometimes all our loved ones need is to be redirected to a way they can actually help. If after you give them ways to help they decline, it’s okay to say, “Then the most helpful thing you can do for me is not make comments about my space.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Lots of decisions are moral decisions, but cleaning your car regularly is not one of them. You can be a fully functioning, fully successful, happy, kind, generous adult and never be very good at cleaning your dishes in a timely manner or have an organized home. How you relate to care tasks—whether you are clean or dirty, messy or tidy, organized or unorganized—has absolutely no bearing on whether you are a good enough person.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Dancing for Dopamine There is an old saying that “neurons that fire together wire together.” It simply means your brain can start associating feelings with certain experiences. For example, dance every day to the same happy song with your baby, or your pet, or a friend on facetime. After a week, play that song while folding laundry or doing dishes. Your brain has now associated happiness with your song and will provide the same dopamine reward when you hear it.”
― KC Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: 31 Days of Compassionate Help

“You are already worthy of love and belonging. This is not a journey of worthiness but a journey of care.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“I believe the moral gut check here isn’t “Am I contributing enough?” but “Am I taking advantage of someone else?”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“the gulf between what we know in our minds and what we feel in our hearts is often an insurmountable distance.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“sometimes it helps to consider your body as separate from you. You have a body—you are not your body. So even if you think your body is a little bit ratty, you can get to know it, slowly, curiously, nonjudgmentally, by caring for it. And it might end up your friend.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising

“Summary: Contribution and productivity are not moral values—but nonexploitation and humility are. When someone demands the benefits of being a part of a family but refuses responsibilities to that family of which they are capable, it’s a form of entitlement that exploits the other members of that family. However, having a limited capacity is not the same as being entitled and accepting help is not the same as exploiting others.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“a system never becomes easy or automatic for you, then it just means either the system isn’t the right one for you or you need more tips and tools to get the system to work. The issue is never that you are failing or not good enough.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“You know, those single-use masks everyone is wearing in the pandemic are made of plastic too,” my friend Imani Barbarin said to me. Imani is a talented disability advocate who often speaks about the intersection of disability and environmentalism. She pointed out that the acceptable use of plastic is always set according to what a healthy person needs to be healthy (think masks, gloves, plastic prescription bottles, kinesiology tape… even home delivery supplements that individually package your daily vitamins), but when it comes to someone with a disability using plastic, everyone wants to shame them for killing the planet. “You need what you need,” she said to me in a gentle but firm voice. She was right.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Jennifer Lynn Barnes, a YA author tweeted: One time, I was at a Q&A with Nora Roberts, and someone asked her how to balance writing and kids, and she said that the key to juggling is to know that some of the balls you have in the air are made of plastic & some are made of glass.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“I was tired. I was depressed. I was overwhelmed. I was in need of help. But I was not lazy. And neither are you.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Just clean as you go” sounds nice and efficient, but most people don’t appreciate the hundreds of skills it takes to operate that way and the thousands of barriers that can interfere with execution.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning