I believe deeply in letting go of shame*, especially when it comes to house work. There are a lot of reasons why house keeping can get away from you and putting a lot of shame on yourself about it is unnecessary and counter productive. I know this deeply and truly about other people. It is much much harder to apply those beliefs to myself. A couple of days ago I saw this tweet:
I had this flood of feelings, like, “Preach it! Housework IS morally neutral,” and “ohmygod, housework is morally neutral why can’t I ever remember that?” I followed the thread and discovered she was talking about KC Davis, LPC and linked to her very short book, which I am reviewing, her website, and her tiktok.
The book, How to Keep House While Drowning: 31 Days of Compassionate Help is very short, and on Kindle Unlimited, if you have that. I recommend it whether you struggle with care tasks or not. Even if you have never had a problem doing your dishes, you know someone who has. Either way, removing the moral valuation of cleanliness is going to be helpful to you or someone you care about now or in the future. Davis’ 6 Pillars of strugglecare are:
- Care tasks are morally neutral
- Rest is a right, not a reward
- You deserve kindness regardless of your level of functioning
- You can’t save the rainforest if you’re depressed
- Shame is the enemy of functioning
- Good enough is perfect
By page 11, Davis is giving concrete strategies for cleaning a messy space without becoming overwhelmed. She keeps her chapters short and she gets directly to her points about the moral neutrality of unfolded laundry, finding your compassionate voice, and gentle skill building. She advocated for replacing the moral view of cleaning with a functional view: the purpose of the cleaning is not to end up with a perfect, clean space, the purpose is to have a functional space. There is no grand reward at the end of your life for always having a clean sink, but if you are about to start cooking, it really helps to have a sink that is not full of dirty dishes. I bring this up because a few years ago I made a commitment to myself to end every day with an empty, clean sink and clean counters. I like starting the day with a clean(ish) kitchen. The pandemic has made that surprisingly challenging. I go fewer places and have fewer people in the my space, so why is keeping it clean harder? Focus and energy. I find it harder to focus on everything so it takes longer to get anything done, so I am more exhausted at the end of the day. I didn’t realize I was allowing shame to build up until I started reading How to Keep House While Drowning.
She repeats frequently that shame is a terrible motivator, an unnecessary burden, and a likely to cause future damage. In addition to encouraging us to remove shame from taking care of our physical space and our bodies, she encourages us to make rest a right and not a reward. If we have the right to rest when we want to, we don’t rest in shame and the quality of our rest is better. She differentiates between rest and sleep. Rest is the activities you engage in while conscious that help you recharge. It is as much a right as sleep.
You do not exist to maintain a space of static perfection. Care tasks exist for one reason only….to make your body and space functional enough for you to easily experience the joy this world has to offer.
While Davis isn’t talking about rest as resistance, I do want to direct your attention to The Nap Ministry. The Nap Ministry was started by Tricia Hersey, a Black woman, to advocate for rest as an act of resistance to capitalism and white supremacy. Given the history of white women coopting social justice movements started by Black women, I want to be sure the work of The Nap Ministry is seen and Hersey’s leadership is respected.
Throughout the book and on her website and tiktok, Davis offers additional resources. I like the mindset of approaching chores from a functionality perspective. Removing shame from caring for your home and for yourself allows room to be good enough, to ask for help, and to hire help. What’s funny is that my housemate and I were talking about how difficult we have found it to clean in the last few months. She suggested that when it’s safe to do so, we hire someone to do a deep clean of the house and then we can go back to maintaining it. The idea stirred up a lot of feelings of guilt and shame and I argued for a little bit. She pointed out that it’s exactly what I would suggest to a friend in the same situation. She’s right. It takes practice and it’s practice I clearly need.
*This does not apply to people who choose to be assholes or cruel to others.
I clearly need to read this book. I live with a crushing amount of guilt about how messy our home is constantly, and there is never enough time to tidy and clean it properly, because I have a full-time job, a very active toddler, both my husband and I struggle with depression and mental illnesses, I barely know where to begin with getting this place under control.
Check your email.
thank you, thank you, THANK YOU for bringing this to my attention!
I hope it helps.
Hooboy, every single person in my life needs to read this book.
It would make so many people’s lives better if we could divorce moral valuation from cleaning.
Oh goodness. I struggle hard with the shame feelings around the fact that I do not and cannot stress clean. When everyone else was seemingly spending the early parts of pandemic lockdown cleaning/organizing/purging their spaces I was decidedly not.
I’ve been working on being okay with achieving functional clean, and setting up goals that make routines that are healthy and achievable particularly when anxiety and depression put me into a blanket wrapped stasis in clutter piles. Also, I’m blessed with a best friend who will see me struggling and step in, judgement free. Everyone should have an Ale.
She uses an analogy Nora Roberts made about priorities – some of the balls you are juggling are glass and some are plastic. It’s ok to drop the plastic balls. Your mental health is a glass ball, cleaning is plastic.
I’m so glad you have an Ale. I need to work on approaching myself with that lack of judgment.
Thanks for this review. I’m definitely going to read this book, and probably soon. I keep telling myself the things I “should” be doing around the house, but depression makes it hard. It would help to have a reminder of just how unhelpful the word “should” is. Seems like this book is a cross between Unf*uck Your Habitat and Brene Brown.
She definitely borrows from both. I’m not sure that she’s better than anyone else out there, but I appreciate that she is focused on cleaning enough to be functional because we deserve to live in functional spaces, and that her book is short. It’s awesome to be able to recommend something so short even someone with a squirrely attention span can read it quickly.