How to Keep House While Drowning

by K.C. Davis

If you want to adapt the systems you read about because you feel like if you can finally get on top of your housework or have that rainbow-colored bookcase and perfectly matched socks you’ll finally be a person worthy of kindness and love and belonging, you are always going to feel inadequate.

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.

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.

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.

regardless of how tightly we embrace the functional view of care tasks, the reality is there are seasons of life when there are more care tasks to do than there is time in the day (or energy in the body). Work, relationships, activism, care tasks, hobbies, and, for some, parenting all compete for that same time and energy.4 Even if we understand that doing everything perfectly is impossible, most of us still have a hard time shaking the constant guilt about how things should look. It can be a struggle deciding exactly what to prioritize when time and energy are short.

Feeling shame for not being sustainable, for eating meat, or for purchasing fast fashion when you are fighting to get through the day is not going to cause you to magically gain the ability to do something different. Shame is a horrible long-term motivator. It is more likely to contribute to dysfunction and continued cycles of unsustainable practices.

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. Take that energy to Congress.

Unlearn the idea that care tasks must be totally complete before you can sit down.

when you experience legitimate barriers to completing care tasks while living in a partnership with someone else, you may experience guilt. Even those who have understanding partners experience this from time to time. Let’s explore what is morally neutral about contributing to a family. I believe the moral gut check here isn’t “Am I contributing enough?” but “Am I taking advantage of someone else?” You are not required to contribute to be worthy of love and care and belonging.

you could be connected to a ventilator unable to contribute anything (and in fact be using lots of resources) and still be a worthy human being. We all have seasons of life when we are capable of contributing more or less than the people around us.

I recently had someone comment on a video of mine saying, “You’d look better if you lost weight.” My first thought was, “Look better to who?” because I don’t feel any obligation to produce sexual attractiveness for some rando on the internet.

Ha!

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.