How to Keep House While Drowning

by K.C. Davis

As I was a messy and creative woman with undiagnosed ADHD, that word held a deep and cutting power. Like a snake, I felt the voice that visited me nightly crawl up my throat, wrap its body around my neck, and hiss into my ear, “See? I told you you were failing.”

Care tasks are the “chores” of life: cooking, cleaning, laundry, feeding, dishes, and hygiene. These may seem like noncomplex tasks. But when you actually break down the amount of time, energy, skill, planning, and maintenance that go into care tasks, they no longer seem simple.

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 diff...

When barriers to functioning make completing care tasks difficult, a person can experience an immense amount of shame. “How can I be failing at something so simple?” they think to themselves. The critical internal dialogue quickly forms a vicious cycle, paralyzing the person even further.

You are not lazy or dirty or gross. You are not a failure. You just need nonjudgmental and compassionate help.

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.

When I viewed getting my life together as a way for trying to atone for the sin of falling apart, I stayed stuck in a shame-fueled cycle of performance, perfectionism, and failure.

I’ll say it again: you don’t exist to serve your space; your space exists to serve you.

Because you must know, dear heart, that you are worthy of care whether your house is immaculate or a mess.

morality concerns itself with the goodness or badness of your character and the rightness or wrongness of decisions. Lots of decisions are moral decisions, but cleaning your car regularly is not one of them.

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.

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. So if you ever actually let yourself sit down and rest, you’re thinking, “I don’t deserve to do this. There is more to do.” This is an incredibly painful way to live. It affects your entire life: your mental health, your relationships, your friendships, your work or schooling, your physical health. It is impossible for the kindness or affirmation of others to penetrate your heart when you are thinking, “If you only knew…” But it doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, I have very good news for you. 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. You are not a failure because you can’t keep up with laundry. Laundry is morally neutral.

Next time you are trying to talk yourself into doing a care task, what would it be like to replace the voice that says, “Ugh, I should really go clean my house right now because it’s a disaster,” with “It would be such a kindness to future me if I were to get up right now and do _______. That task will allow me to experience comfort, convenience, and pleasure later.”

No one ever shamed themselves into better mental health.

In addiction recovery, as in most of life, success depends not on having strong willpower, but in developing mental and emotional tools to help you experience the world differently.

Many self-help gurus overattribute their success to their own hard work without any regard to the physical, mental, or economic privileges they hold.

Someone who is affected by serious mental illness or systemic oppression has a lot more standing in the way of a happy life than a simple attitude adjustment.

Although it looks like a lot, there are actually only five things in any room: (1) trash, (2) dishes, (3) laundry, (4) things that have a place and are not in their place, and (5) things that do not have a place.

The Five Things Tidying Method helps the brain know exactly what it is looking for, so instead of seeing a sea of clutter and being paralyzed, it can start to see individual items. Ignoring everything but that one category helps to keep you on track and not get distracted. You can move faster when you know what you are looking for.

remember that because care tasks are morally neutral, mess has no inherent meaning. When you look at the pile of dishes in the sink and think, “I’m such a failure,” that message did not originate from the dishes. Dishes don’t think. Dishes don’t judge. Dishes cannot make meaning—only people can.

There may be other complex and contextual reasons why your family or community gave you the messages they did about care tasks. You may need time to consider, to honor, to grieve, and to process the origins of such messages.

What you say to yourself when your house is clean fuels what you say to yourself when it’s dirty.

You can break down care tasks into three layers. At their foundation, care tasks have the basic function of keeping your body or space safe and healthy.

It’s easier to tolerate the repetitive nature of care tasks if we let go of moral messages and isolate the functional reason for doing them.

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 it.

The next time the bully starts talking and the little self starts shrinking, you can call on your compassionate observer self.

Organization means having a place for everything in your home and having a system for getting it there. “Tidiness” and “messiness” describe how quickly things go back to their place. A tidy person typically returns things to their home immediately whereas a messy person does not.

Being organized means tidying moves more quickly and makes my life more functional and cleaning less overwhelming.

I love a calming visual as much as the next person, but it’s important to remember that not everything has to be aesthetically pleasing to be organized and not everything aesthetically pleasing is functional! No one is coming to take photographs of the vitamins, Pledge spray, salt, and cup of pens sitting on my island turntable. But that doesn’t mean it’s not organized. The truth is that if it’s where you meant it to be, then it’s organized.

If you have a diagnosis like ADHD, autism, PTSD, or depression (and many others), you are probably familiar with task initiation problems, because those diagnoses famously create problems with executive functioning, of which task initiation is one.

I tidy things up not because it’s bad that it’s messy but because it has reached the end of that cycle of functionality and I need to reset it so it can have another twenty-four hours of it serving me.

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.

Remember, at the end of the day it’s really not that important whether you figure out a way to “stay on top of your laundry.” What’s important is learning to treat yourself with compassion and have a kind inner dialogue about laundry. If you never figure it out but have less shame in your life and more joy, I’d say that’s a win.

you are not responsible for saving the world if you are struggling to save yourself.

this tier. No person can do all the good things all the time and expecting yourself to just sets up an oppressive perfectionism to which no one can live up. Imperfection is required for a good life.