How to Keep House While Drowning Quotes

“I’ll say it again: you don’t exist to serve your space; your space exists to serve you.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“What we need here is a paradigm shift on how we look at ourselves and our space. I’ll say it again: you don’t exist to serve your space; your space exists to serve you.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“I realized in my late twenties that I’d been playing out the same pattern over and over without realizing it: looking for a role to fill that would finally make me worthy of kindness and love and belonging. 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.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“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 reduction before first addressing individual harm reduction.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“nobody is doing all the good things all the time”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“This is what I try to teach my children when we talk about care tasks in our home. Instead of telling them that contributing is a moral obligation, I place the value on our attitudes towards one another. I want my kids to be responsible, yes. But just as important, I want them to know that it's okay to not "pull their weight" when they are sick with the flu. I want my kids to grow up to care for others and treat them fairly without being crushed by the false guilt of thinking their worth is tied to how much they can produce or contribute.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“I’m learning that 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. Loving families might insist that their home sparkle or their children’s clothes be spotless, not out of a perceived superiority, but as a way of protecting against discrimination.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“thank you for your concern, but I am not taking any feedback on this issue right now.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“When I was sent to rehab for a year and a half at the age of sixteen, I was able to crawl out of the addiction but found myself just anxious to be thought of as the poster child of a “good client” as a substitute for genuine self-worth. Even a very real experience of religious faith was hijacked by my need to fill this hole. After becoming a missionary and attending seminary, I was quietly ashamed to discover that a majority of my motivation for doing so was again to become a person who was seen as good enough by those around me. I realized in my late twenties that I’d been playing out the same pattern over and over without realizing it: looking for a role to fill that would finally make me worthy of kindness and love and belonging. 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.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“We know now that care tasks are morally neutral and have nothing to do with being a good or bad person. We also are learning that we deserve kindness regardless of our level of functioning.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Anything worth doing is worth doing partially.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“The weight you are after you adopt healthy habits into your life is the weight you are supposed to be.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“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.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“gentle skill building: a system for keeping your car clean i dunno, friends. My car looks like shit. I don’t have this one figured out. I may never have this one figured out. That’s okay too. I honestly stopped putting much effort into trying. 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.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Sometimes I come downstairs after putting the kids to bed, look at the house mess, and think, “I really want to sit down, but doing closing duties would be such a kindness to morning me, so I’m going to put on some music and motivate.” Other times I come down those stairs and feel the subtle pang of a body and mind asking to be cared for right now—and on those nights I do the bare minimum or even nothing at all. Remember, laziness doesn’t exist.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“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.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“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.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“But the moral issue is not that that partner is not contributing enough—it’s that they feel more entitled to rest than their partner and are exploiting their partner’s labor to get it. If you feel more entitled to more respect because of your gender or the size of your paycheck, that is wrong.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“tool that can be very helpful when deciding how to prioritize and de-prioritize items is the 9 square. Pick an area of your life. School, activism, parenting, et cetera. For our example, we will use self-care. Write a list of things you think are important for your self-care. First, think of the self-care items that have the highest impact on your mental health. Let’s say taking your medication, showering, and having clean dishes. Next list those item that have a medium impact (rest, socializing, and exercise) and those that have a lower impact (laying out tomorrow’s outfit, folding clothes, and cleaning your floors). You can choose as many items as you’d like. Next, divide them into those things that take low effort, medium effort, or a high amount of effort. Place your items in the corresponding squares in the chart.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“What I need to do here is find a way to create momentum. Just like with my exercise bike, we can widen the entry point to the task by creating an on-ramp.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Organization means having a place for everything in your home and having a system for getting it there.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“The solution is to develop achievable and even rewarding strategies for tackling a larger end of day reset. That’s what works for me and it’s just as valid as the choice of those who prefer to clean as they go.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“When I ask myself what makes my kitchen function for me I can begin to identify concrete needs such as having enough clean dishes for the day, enough clear counter space to prepare food safely, access to my sink and a stove burner, and an empty trash can. Suddenly all that is really required fits on a short, finite list. I can do a few things to feel like I have cared for my needs. Then move on.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“easier to tolerate the repetitive nature of care tasks if we let go of moral messages and isolate the functional reason for doing them.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Chores → care tasks Chores are obligations. Care tasks are kindness to self. Cleaning → resetting the space”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Begin to notice how you speak to yourself on days when you feel you have fallen behind. 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.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Our brains need to see progress or they get discouraged. Category cleaning gives your brain multiple, quick finish lines to feel good about.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“My friend and I are simply strength-oriented and stuck in different ways, with no discernable reason to which we can point. Because of this, my advice for getting things done at work won’t help her at all, mostly because it amounts to “Drink a big coffee and just make yourself do it. Then wait around to be inspired about what to do next.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“However, when I sit down to write or to work on my business, everything flows naturally. Sometimes I have to push myself slightly to get over a hurdle, but the hurdles always feel surmountable. I actually have to set a timer to remind me to look at the clock because I will get carried away and lose track of time. I feel creative, energized, and rewarded at the end of the day.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“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.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning