How to Keep House While Drowning: 31 Days of Compassionate Help

by K.C. Davis

You deserve love and compassion regardless of your level of functioning. True skill building can only happen in an atmosphere of profound self-compassion and gentleness.

When you view care tasks as moral, the motivation for completing them is often shame. When everything is in place, you don’t feel like a failure; when it’s messy or untidy, you do. If you are completing care tasks from a motivation of shame, you are probably also relaxing in shame too—because care tasks never end and you view rest as a reward for good boys and girls.

Care tasks are morally neutral. Being good or bad at them has nothing to do with being a good person, parent, man, woman, spouse, friend. Literally nothing.

Instead of bullying yourself into finishing a task, instead try giving yourself permission to start a task. Let yourself get a little done. Set a timer for 10 minutes and give yourself full permission to stop when the timer goes off.

Anything worth doing is worth doing partially.

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.

Unfortunately, as the role of the daughter, wife, and mother has widened to allow for personal ambitions, careers, and equal partnership in the “working world,” the pattern of placing the main responsibility for a family’s care tasks on the women in the family still remains.

When you have functional barriers, things pile up fast. It’s not uncommon to suddenly find yourself in an overwhelming mess. The more you stare at it, the most defeated you feel, the less motivation you have, the more you avoid it, and the more it piles up. This cycle is very painful.

The next time the bully starts talking and the little self starts shrinking, you can call on your compassionate observer self. They say to the bully, “You are not being helpful and I need you to stop.” And they turn to the little self and say, “I know you are in pain, and I know you feel like you are failing. But you aren’t. It’s not a moral failing to be untidy. Being unwell and struggling do not make you unworthy of kindness. You are going to be ok. I am here with you.”

You are not responsible for saving the world if you are struggling to save yourself. If you must use paper plates for meals or throw away recycling in order to gain better functioning, you should do so. When you are healthy and happy, you will gain to capacity to do real good for the world. In the meantime, your job is to survive.

No one is made functional overnight, and some people may always have barriers. The goal then is to take steps that reduce harm, first to self, then to those individuals around us, then to our community. You cannot jump right to community harm reduction before first addressing individual harm reduction.

Harm reduction is always ethical.

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. When you are struggling to function, it’s important to identify what are your glass balls.

You do not Exist to Serve your Space, Your Space Exists to Serve You

You do not exist to maintain a space of static perfection. Care tasks exist for one reason only....to make your body and space functional enough for you to easily experience the joy this world has to offer.