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.

When I viewed getting my life together as a way for trying to atone for the sin of falling apart, I stayed stuck in a shame-fueled cycle of performance, perfectionism, and failure.

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.

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

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.

It’s stressful to try to summon up 100 percent of the momentum to do something while sitting on the couch. 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.

Not everything has to be clean at the same time.

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

Harm reduction is always ethical.

Perfectionism is debilitating. I want you to embrace adaptive imperfection. We aren’t settling for less; we are engaging in adaptive routines that help us live and function and thrive. Good enough is perfect.

It’s a wonderful thing to investigate what foods and nutrients help your body function and feel best. But making or keeping yourself thin is not a care task.

Your weight is morally neutral.

I don’t feel any obligation to produce sexual attractiveness for some rando on the internet.

Nothing you ate yesterday, said today, or have left undone for tomorrow can take away your right to be fed.

All calories are good calories when you’re having a hard time. There are no good or bad foods. There are no right or wrong foods. And I’m gonna say it: there are no foods that are absolutely healthy or unhealthy.

Being kind to yourself while eating ice cream is healthier than hating yourself while eating a salad.