How to Keep House While Drowning

by K.C. Davis

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. 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.”

Anything worth doing is worth doing partially.

you are not responsible for saving the world if you are struggling to save yourself. If you must use paper plates for meals or throw away recycling in order to gain better functioning, you should do so. When you are functioning again, you will gain the capacity to do real good for the world. In the meantime, your job is to survive.

Someone with diabetes can use disposable needles and you can buy a fucking prepackaged salad so you eat. The impact that you could have on the world when you are fully functioning far outweighs the negligible negative impact that one household’s disposable plastic or extra water usage will have.

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. Those who feel anger at someone with clinical depression or ADHD for not engaging in eco-optimal behaviors are seriously deluded.

One of the major tenets of health professions is harm reduction. No one is made functional overnight, and some people may always have barriers. The goal then is to take steps that reduce harm, first to self, then to those individuals around us, then to our community. You cannot jump right to community harm

As with any care task, self-compassion is key. Shame is the enemy of functioning.

Remember that anything worth doing is worth doing half-assed.

Research shows that people who report feeling burnout can take months or even years before they start feeling recovered from the damage of that psychological stress.

I so often look back on these seasons of limping through and say to myself with tenderness, “Wow, I was really doing the best I could with what I had.” And that’s the funny thing about doing your best; it never feels like your best at the time. In fact, it almost always feels like failing when you’re in it. When I look back at sixteen-year-old me in rehab, sobbing alone and feeling worthless, constantly being told I wasn’t making enough progress, I see now she was doing her best. I sometimes wish someone at the time could have seen it and told me so. But that’s okay. I tell her myself now all the time.