How to Keep House While Drowning

by K.C. Davis

Care tasks are the “chores” of life: cooking, cleaning, laundry, feeding, dishes, and hygiene.

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.

Our feelings of failure after not living up to the newest self-care movement or organizational system stem from fundamental misunderstanding about what kind of journey we are on.

Because you must know, dear heart, that you are worthy of care whether your house is immaculate or a mess.

How you relate to care tasks—whether you are clean or dirty, messy or tidy, organized or unorganized—has absolutely no bearing on whether you are a good enough person.

When you view care tasks as moral, the motivation for completing them is often shame.

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.

Next time you are trying to talk yourself into doing a care task, what would it be like to replace the voice that says, “Ugh, I should really go clean my house right now because it’s a disaster,” with “It would be such a kindness to future me if I were to get up right now and do _______. That task will allow me to experience comfort, convenience, and pleasure later.”

Sometimes you may not get up even with the change in self-talk. But you know what? You weren’t getting up when you were being mean to yourself either, so at least you can be nice to yourself. 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.

Many self-help gurus overattribute their success to their own hard work without any regard to the physical, mental, or economic privileges they hold.

I suspect that many people doling out productivity advice focus on areas where they’re naturally gifted—areas where all they needed was a little push or a couple of tips to get themselves unstuck.

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.

Listen to me. Picture my hands cupping your face and my eyes looking directly into yours. Take a deep breath. Heed these words: It’s okay, friend. Throw it away.

The clothes you’ve been meaning to donate that have been sitting there for six months—throw them away.

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.

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

Try writing down your various care tasks and isolating the functional reason for doing each of them.

For a lot of people, finding a method that bypasses the most executive functioning barriers or that makes a task a little less intolerable is better than what’s “quickest.” In the end, the approach that you are motivated to do and enjoy doing is the most “efficient,” because you are actually doing it and not avoiding it.

One reason that popular programs for cleaning don’t work for everyone is that they so often fail to address what is happening emotionally around the task.

We also are learning that we deserve kindness regardless of our level of functioning.

If a friend said, “I am so worthless,” you might say, “I think it’s pretty normal to make mistakes. That doesn’t mean you aren’t worthy.”

“Tidiness” and “messiness” describe how quickly things go back to their place.

And here’s the key, here’s the trick: the baskets go where the stuff already went.

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.

There are a few brands that sell visual timers. Time Timer and Secura are two good brands.

Not everything has to be clean at the same time.

Keeping things functional is the point because here’s the thing: it will look like that again tomorrow only if I clean it today. If I don’t clean it, it will be even more messy because we live here and we create mess.

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.

One tool that can be very helpful when deciding how to prioritize and de-prioritize items is the 9 square.

It may seem odd that laying out an outfit for tomorrow is prioritized over exercise. But this way of thinking of priorities allows you to do the most good with the least amount of energy.

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.

Does all laundry really need to be folded? Undies, baby clothes, athletic shorts, and pajamas usually do just fine being bunched up in a drawer or a clean laundry basket.

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.

nobody is doing all the good things all the time

Imperfection is required for a good life.

jennifer Lynn Barnes, a YA author, tweeted: One time, I was at a Q&A with Nora Roberts, and someone asked her how to balance writing and kids, and she said that the key to juggling is to know that some of the balls you have in the air are made of plastic & some are made of glass.

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

sometimes it helps to consider your body as separate from you.

as I have started down the road of understanding self-compassion, I have found one—just one—affirmation that actually does work for me. And it’s this: “I am allowed to be human.”

If you go through your whole life thinking that every time you clean the fridge it has to be perfect, every time you take a shower it has to be perfect, every time you do a work project it has to be perfect, you will burn out and hate your life.

When we believe our worth is dependent on completing the never-ending list of care tasks, we are unlikely to let ourselves rest until everything is done.

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.

Care tasks are a never-ending list, and if you wait until everything is done to rest, you will never rest.

Rest is necessary for energy, and rest is necessary for work.