How to Keep House While Drowning

by K.C. Davis

There it was. The word that had haunted me for so much of my life. 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.”

the gulf between what we know in our minds and what we feel in our hearts is often an insurmountable distance.

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.

Sometimes you may not get up even with the change in self-talk. But you know what? You weren’t getting up when you were being mean to yourself either, so at least you can be nice to yourself. No one ever shamed themselves into better mental health.

Climate change is real. Environmentalism is important. But we are not going to fix the earth by shaming people with mental health and neurodiverse needs out of adaptive routines they need to function.

You do not have to earn the right to rest, connect, or recreate. Unlearn the idea that care tasks must be totally complete before you can sit down.

We were lying next to my husband, a man whom I love deeply and who loves me. On the floor on a little pallet was my three-year-old, a spitfire little sprite who brightens my world. I realized that I only ever wanted to be skinny because I wanted to be loved and happy. But I already have that. Skinny hasn’t seemed very important to me since then.