How to Keep House While Drowning Quotes

“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. The year I spent stuck inside”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“6 I promise God does not care how you do your laundry.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“I have a philosophy: You don’t exist to serve your space; your space exists to serve you.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising

“You know what does exist? Executive dysfunction, procrastination, feeling overwhelmed, perfectionism, trauma, amotivation, chronic pain, energy fatigue, depression, lack of skills, lack of support, and differing priorities.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising

“you deserve a beautiful sunday”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“There is no right way here; it’s simply what is the lower stress option. You get to decide.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“stare at the fridge with little sentient leg weights hanging on to my ankles,”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“food is morally neutral you deserve to eat. Nothing you ate yesterday, said today, or have left undone for tomorrow can take away your right to be fed. Your inability to create a nutritiously perfect meal today does not mean your body is better off not eating. 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. Healthy is a wholistic state of being that requires more than just knowing the amount and type of nutrients in the food you are eating. Being kind to yourself while eating ice cream is healthier than hating yourself while eating a salad. Anxiety and perfectionism are not good for your health. At the end of the day, your relationship to food is as much a factor in your health as fueling your body in a way that makes you feel good is.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“One night I was lying in bed and cuddling my eighteen-month-old. She was asleep in my arms with her angelic face resting in the crook of my elbow. We were lying next to my husband, a man whom I love deeply and who loves me. On the floor on a little pallet was my three-year-old, a spitfire little sprite who brightens my world. I realized that I only ever wanted to be skinny because I wanted to be loved and happy. But I already have that. Skinny hasn’t seemed very important to me since then.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“There are lots of ways to make your body smaller that will not produce better health.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Exercise, as it currently exists in most of our lives, sucks. Like most care tasks, when they function only to fulfill external standards of what we should be doing, it actually moves us further away from real care for self. But when I look back at my life and ask myself, “What memories of movement do I have that are joyful?” I well up with tears. I remember cheerleading in the eighth grade and feeling so happy as my body hit every beat on point and in sync with the rest of my team. I remember jumping higher than I think any human has as we won second place in a championship. I remember how strong I felt that I could throw a girl in the air. I remember youth soccer games and the absolute rush it gave me to feel my foot connect with power to the ball. I remember dancing stoned out of my mind at a Bob Marley festival, barefoot and uncaring that my body moved like a jellyfish, oblivious to the beat or how it should be moving. I remember, at ten years sober, when my wedding DJ dedicated “Rehab” by Amy Winehouse to all of us who had come through hell and survived and an entire dance floor of little sober assholes absolutely went nuts on the dance floor. I remember Josh splitting his pants. I remember my husband looking at me like no other woman existed. I remember being carried over the threshold of our hotel that night, not out of tradition, but because I had worn the bottoms of my feet raw dancing. When did movement lose its pleasure? When did my adult life stop including activities that made movement joyful? Can I get it back? Can you? Can we try together?”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“chapter 37 exercise sucks i blame PE class as the first offender. I really do. At such an early age kids who love to play active games are made to run laps instead. Okay, maybe that isn’t every school, but it was certainly the first time I remember someone divorcing physical activity from fun and creating the demon that is exercise. Then diet culture came along and told us the reason we should be engaging this exercise is primarily to keep our bodies thin and attractive. These things have really wrecked our relationship to joyful body movement. If you are motivated to an activity by body shame, experience the activity as a chorus of unpleasant sensory experiences (pain, boredom, and sweat are my three least favorite things in the world), and then end with no immediate results, why on earth would you like that activity or want to do it ever again?”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“If you have a particularly rude or pushy person in your life, you can use my favorite boundary phrase, which is “thank you for your concern, but I am not taking any feedback on this issue right now.” Or my personal favorite: “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

“My point is, sometimes it helps to consider your body as separate from you. You have a body—you are not your body. So even if you think your body is a little bit ratty, you can get to know it, slowly, curiously, nonjudgmentally, by caring for it. And it might end up your friend.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“it’s not wrong to prioritize your functioning and find other ways you can contribute to environmentalism. 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 reduction before first addressing individual harm reduction. Therefore, if a newly widowed woman struggles to eat, she is released from the obligation of having an eco-perfect diet not because eating ethically is unimportant, but because when the real-world choices for someone are eating dairy or eating nothing, it is always the ethical choice to eat. It is always the ethical choice to encourage that person to eat whatever they can manage. Harm reduction is always ethical.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“The truth is that it’s not waste if you are using something to function. Running your sprinklers every day for fifteen minutes is wasting water because that’s more water than your yard needs to live. Grocery stores and restaurants throw out good food daily and that’s wasting food. Not getting a dripping faucet fixed when you can afford to is wasting water. But using something is not the same as wasting something. It’s okay to use a paper plate to eat if you’re depressed and otherwise would’ve struggled to eat at all. Someone with diabetes can use disposable needles and you can buy a fucking prepackaged salad so you eat.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“No person can do all the good things all the time and expecting yourself to just sets up an oppressive perfectionism to which no one can live up. Imperfection is required for a good life.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“I would like to acknowledge Dr. Brené Brown and Dr. Kristin Neff as profound influences on my work, as their research on shame and self-compassion, respectively, has been foundational for me. I would also like to acknowledge Caroline Dooner, whose book The F*ck It Diet introduced me to the Intuitive Eating principles of food and body neutrality, a concept that springboarded me into questioning what other aspects of my life were neither good nor bad, and Lesley Cook, PsyD, who has contributed so much to my understanding of executive functioning and how best to help those who struggle with it.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Extra silverware rack: I found that fishing the dirty silverware out of a gross sink was a huge sticking point for me. I bought a second dishwasher dish caddy and put it on the counter so I can throw dirty utensils in it all day and then just switch it out with the clean one at the end of the day!”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Dirty-dish station: Getting a drying rack just for dirty dishes can mean that when it comes time to wash them or load them into the dishwasher you feel less overwhelmed. This is because the dishes are organized in a way that is not visually overwhelming. Some families find that purchasing a dish tub really increases the functionality of their space. This way, dirty dishes can be placed into the tub, keeping the sink clear for other needs.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Even when I’m by myself, I tend to wander excitedly from project to project without quite wrapping up the former one before beginning the next. This isn’t a flaw. I like spending my day this way. It’s fun and enjoyable for me. It does make for a bigger mess at the end of the day, but the answer isn’t to force myself into a clean-as-you-go habit that doesn’t work for my brain. 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

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

“If I had spent those seven months telling myself I was a piece of shit every time I looked at that laundry pile, I probably would not have had the motivation to do it despite having the time. That is because if a laundry pile represents failure, and I’m already struggling with a newborn and a pandemic and an energetic toddler, my brain, which is trying desperately to avoid pain and seek pleasure (or at least relief from pain), is never going to give me the green light to lean in to yet another painful experience like spending 30 minutes in my failure pile of laundry. But it’s not failure. It’s laundry.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: 31 Days of Compassionate Help

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

“could exhaust myself making it look like a showroom all the time, but then I wouldn’t have time to take my kids to go get Halloween costumes today, or talk to a friend on the phone for an hour, or write this book.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

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

“Followed by a few attempts to get back on track, which also fail. I never manage to recapture that initial motivation and in turn give up completely and feel guilty whenever I look at the thing.”
― 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 Cleaning is endless. Resetting the space has a goal. It’s so messy in here! → this space has reached the end of its functional cycle It’s so messy in here feels like failure. This space has reached the end of its functional cycle is morally neutral. Good enough is good enough → good enough is perfect Good enough is good enough sounds like settling for less. Good enough is perfect means having boundaries and reasonable expectations. Shortcut:”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

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

“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.” It isn’t a hack, really. It’s not a formula guaranteed to make you get up. 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.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning