Inside you will learn:
· How to shift your perspective of care tasks from moral to functional
· How to stop negative self-talk and shame around care tasks
· How to give yourself permission to rest, even when things aren’t finished
· How to motivate yourself to care for your space Plague of Darkness this compassionate guide will help you begin to get free of the shame and anxiety you feel over home care.
Inside you will learn:
· How to shift your perspective of care tasks from moral to functional
· How to stop negative self-talk and shame around care tasks
· How to give yourself permission to rest One Step Too Close even when things aren’t finished
· How to motivate yourself to care for your space Rating: 1 star of 5
Oh, boy. Where do I even start with this one?
First, I think the book is mistitled. How to Keep House While Drowning implies that the author is going to share some tips for actually accomplishing that goal. Instead, the reader is basically told that the best way to keep house when feeling overwhelmed, depressed, anxious or when battling your ADHDinduced executive functioning difficulties is simply to not really do so and then not feel bad about it. It reads like a memoir describing how the author decided to stop caring about keeping her own home (and body) clean and came to feel okay about it before recommending that we do the same. That’s not what I was looking for at all.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for self compassion. If I can’t get all of the laundry done today, I’m not going to beat myself up about it. If I leave a dish (or dishes) in the sink overnight because I just want to go to bed and not worry about it until tomorrow, I’m not going to think less of myself for it. If I’m in pain today and can’t get around to something I would have liked to have gotten done, I’m going to care for my body and worry about the house another day. If you have a new baby in the house and are doing your best, I am not going to judge you if your hair hasn’t been washed this week and your counters have clutter and your floors aren’t swept.
But I’m also not going to just decide that I’m incapable of cleaning, tidying or caring for myself, my family and my home well because I have ADHD or anxiety or depression or am busy or whatever else and then try to convince myself that that is okay just because it is hard for me to keep organized, get started on, or finish tasks with consistency. Give us some credit!
There were several things the author recommended that I just did not understand or could not get behind. For example:
Gathering up all the trash in a room and then leaving the trash bag there instead of walking it to the garbage can.
Why would I pick it all up just to be left with a nasty bag of trash sitting in the corner instead of taking an extra 5 seconds to get rid of it?
Throwing away the dishes instead of cleaning them.
Unfortunately, you read that right, and she wasn’t referring to disposable dinnerware.
Throwing all of the clean clothes fresh from the dryer onto the floor in the laundry room where they can live until ready to go back into the washer.
Why would I throw clean clothes onto the dirty floor right after I went through the trouble of washing them? Putting them in a basket, I could understand. Stuffing them into a drawer without bothering to fold them, I can understand. The dirty floor? No. Just no.
Throwing away things that can be recycled or donated. Using singleuse, plastic, prepasted toothbrushes. Being a generally poor, consumerist steward of the planet.
I get where she was coming from with this one. If you really do feel like you’re drowning, you might go through seasons of life when it’s all you can do to just make sure you eat food, drink water and brush your teeth most days. Your priority might not be rinsing out the salsa jar so you can recycle it when you haven’t even been able to care for yourself. There will be times when you might need to eat off paper plates so you can spend time doing something other than washing dishes; when you might need to save up your donations for a rare free afternoon when you can drop them off or ask a friend to drive them over to a donation dropoff point for you (or schedule a pickup). However, what the author seems to condone is of a generally irresponsible (and privileged) approach to living at the ultimate cost of the planet. We can find purpose and satisfaction in knowing that we are doing our small part; that we are being conscious consumers and doing our best to care for the planet in whatever capacity we are capable at the moment. We live here. Caring for the planet is caring for ourselves. Please don’t just irresponsibly dispose of usable items or things that cannot be recycled. And for goodness’ sake, if you can use your hands, you can put toothpaste on your toothbrush or dip it into a jar of baking soda. Most people do not need to buy singleuse toothbrushes to brush their teeth. (That suggestion really irked me.)
Her “chapter” on keeping your car clean should not have been included in the book at all.
It basically read like this: “I haven’t figured this out yet, so what’s the use in trying,” and was comprised of one short paragraph.
Overall, I just did not find the book in the least bit helpful and I found a lot of it quite frustrating. Rather than finding tips for improving organization and executive functioning, encouragement to just do what I can on the hard days and leave the rest for when I am feeling better, or strategies for improving efficiency when strapped for time, I found excuses to give up (and not worry about it) and recommendations to waste time doing so little that my efforts wouldn’t make much difference (or even be counterproductive).
The offputting use of lowercase letters to start opening paragraphs, lowercase letters improperly used for titles, the occasional editing error and the outofplace use of an emoticon and “lol” left me wondering if the book had been professionally edited. I actually checked to see if the book had been selfpublished at one point. (Nope!) I also did not appreciate the obscene language sprinkled throughout, which is, admittedly, of a personal preference.
Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this book. short, sweet, and validating as fuck. 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.
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 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. Simple and super short, but a lot of encouragement packed into a tiny space. Just the simple reframe “household tasks are not moral issues” has helped my mental health already.
Lopera di Rabelais e la cultur la Rabelais
Lopera di Rabelais e la cultur la Rabelais