How to Keep House While Drowning

by K.C. Davis

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. You are not a failure because you can’t keep up with laundry. Laundry is morally neutral.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sometimes the simple reason is that the right way is not enjoyable and so it gets procrastinated.

The truth is that if it’s where you meant it to be, then it’s organized.

It’s rarely about who is trying harder or who is a better person but instead about individual capacity.

Individual capacity is shaped by biology, psychology, and environment.

Task initiation barriers usually present themselves as difficulties in transitions.

Let yourself use 5 percent energy to do 5 percent of the task. Maybe you keep going. Maybe you don’t. That’s okay. Anything worth doing is worth doing partially.

Instead of “I need to finish this” or even “I need to start this,” begin to say to yourself, “How can I move towards this task?”

Next time you want to do a care task, start an enjoyable task and use the wait time to start a care task. Knowing that there is a finish line can lower the barrier to entry.

If your laundry system produces clean clothes, then it’s working.

Not everything has to be clean at the same time.

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.

It’s helpful when seeing your dirty floor to replace “I just can’t keep up” with “I’ve de-prioritized floors for a more important task right now.”

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.

Shame is a horrible long-term motivator. It is more likely to contribute to dysfunction and continued cycles of unsustainable practices.

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.

The truth is that it’s not waste if you are using something to function.

Harm reduction is always ethical.

Shame is the enemy of functioning.

Just start making room for the possibility you are wrong when you say you aren’t worthy.

But if prioritizing a few good things that really matter to you and aiming for good enough with the rest of it lets you come out at the end of the day healthy and able to experience joy—now that’s an excellent life.

You have full permission to do a little, do it with shortcuts, and do the bare minimum.

we find that those who work in shame also rest in shame. Instead of relief, taking a break only brings feelings of guilt.

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.

I find that the balance between rest and work seems to work itself out pretty naturally when you practice self-kindness.

If the framework is keeping things equal, then when a partner says, “I need you to do more,” what the other hears is, “You aren’t doing enough.”

Once feelings of not being appreciated have joined the discussion, we aren’t really talking about the dishes anymore.

True partners will want to do this. They do not view themselves as more entitled to rest than their partner based on paycheck or hours worked.

This isn’t a business deal where you need to protect your interests against an adversary; it’s a partnership where you care about the well-being of each other.

It is your partner’s responsibility to protect your rest time but your responsibility to actually rest. If your own perfectionism has you using your rest times to scrub baseboards, that is not your partner’s fault.

This journey isn’t about some mythical destination where everything has the perfect system; it’s about permission to make things functional and permission to enjoy your life even if your car never gets clean.

It’s times like this when racing the clock or playing motivation games don’t really help. What does help is to just let yourself move as slowly as you need to. No timers. No agenda.

“This is a safe home and I am safe in it.”

Sometimes all our loved ones need is to be redirected to a way they can actually help.

“thank you for your concern, but I am not taking any feedback on this issue right now.”

“The key for me being able to begin to run a functioning home was when I stopped talking to myself the way you are talking to me right now.”

When you want to introduce some new habits or systems into your home to make things a bit more functional, don’t shoot for the moon. Go for the closest to what you’re already doing with a little bit of increased function.

Once a system becomes easy and automatic you can try another little tweak to increase the function even more.

anything that creates momentum is a win.

7 “Flexing the muscles of motivation” is another way of saying we are going to practice this skill until it seems easier to us.

Think of four to six tasks that, if they were done every week, would make that space very livable.

The key is to embrace that idea that there is no finish line of worthiness. You are worthy now. There is only increased function ahead. And it’s going to be wonderful.

Self-care was never meant to be a replacement for community care.

A support deficit is not always someone’s fault. There are just some seasons of life we have to limp through.