How to Keep House While Drowning

by K.C. Davis

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.

Care tasks are morally neutral.

Instead of concluding the problem was that I just needed to try harder the next day, I said out loud, “I didn’t get on the bike yesterday for five minutes even though I do want to get on the bike. This tells me that five minutes was too big of a goal. I wonder if I could get on for three minutes?”

Anything worth doing is worth doing partially.

The goal should not be to make the work equal but to ensure that the rest is fair.

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.

Summary: Contribution and productivity are not moral values—but nonexploitation and humility are. When someone demands the benefits of being a part of a family but refuses responsibilities to that family of which they are capable, it’s a form of entitlement that exploits the other members of that family. However, having a limited capacity is not the same as being entitled and accepting help is not the same as exploiting others.

The best way to do something is the way it gets done.