How to Keep House While Drowning

by K.C. Davis

as most of you may know, the gulf between what we know in our minds and what we feel in our hearts is often an insurmountable distance.

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.

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.

Any task or habit requiring extreme force of will depletes your ability to exert that type of energy over time.

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.

Her belief that the decision to be a positive person was the key to her joyful life reveals she really does not grasp just how much of her success is due to privileges beyond her control. 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.

I’m learning that when marginalized communities face racism or classism, high standards for cleanliness can be a way for a family to reassert their own dignity in the face of dehumanizing stereotypes about being lazy, unintelligent, or dirty. Loving families might insist that their home sparkle or their children’s clothes be spotless, not out of a perceived superiority, but as a way of protecting against discrimination.

Begin to notice how you speak to yourself on days when you feel you have fallen behind. You can set up the best systems in the world and they won’t change your life if you still hate yourself on days when you can’t keep up. So much of our distress comes not from the unfolded laundry but from the messages we give ourselves. Lazy. Predictable. Unlovable. You do not need to be good at care tasks to learn how to develop a compassionate inner dialogue. You deserve kindness and love regardless of how good you are at care tasks.

Cleaning → resetting the space Cleaning is endless. Resetting the space has a goal.

It’s so messy in here! → this space has reached the end of its functional cycle

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 okay. I am here with you.” Think of what you would say to a friend who was struggling and turn the message inward.

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!

In conclusion: being messy is not a moral failing, tidy is simply a preference, organization is functional, and you deserve to function. How would your approach to functional organization change if you threw pretty out the window?

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. If you’ve been living with situational factors that affect executive functioning like trauma, grief, chronic stress, or sleep deprivation, you may also be experiencing issues with task initiation.

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.