How to keep house while drowning (w/ KC Davis) (Transcript)

[00:00:00] Chris Duffy:
You are listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. As I've gotten older and become an official adult, a lot of the skills that I've had to learn along the way have to do with how to take care of my body and how to take care of my home.

I remember being absolutely shocked the first time that I learned that you have to scrub a shower. I'm still honestly a little skeptical, like, how can it need me to do work when all I ever put in here is hot water and soap? I'm giving you all the tools, shower, meet me halfway. But okay, fine. I'm supposed to scrub it. I've learned that. Over the years, I've also done my best to figure out how to do laundry, dishes, whether you're supposed to vacuum, mop, or sweep a floor.

Still a little fuzzy on that one, but I'm figuring it out. And all sorts of other skills. Today's guest, though, KC Davis, is the author of How to Keep House while Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing. And this is a book that, for the first time, really made me think deeply about the morality and the judgments that we put on all of those things.

It changed the way that I see cleaning, hygiene, and self-compassion. Here's a clip from KC's TEDx talk called How to Do Laundry When You're Depressed.

[00:01:10] KC Davis:
I'm just a therapist with ADHD and in February of 2020, I had my second baby. February of 2020 is when the COVID lockdowns happened. In a blur, my days turned into breastfeeding difficulties, toddler meltdowns, and depression. The dishes stayed in the sink for days. The laundry pile reached impressive heights, and there was often not a path to walk from room to room. And when I should have been catching up on sleep, I would lay in bed at night and think to myself, “I’m failing. Maybe I'm not capable of being a good mom to two kids.”

I decided to post a joke video on TikTok one day about my house-turned-disaster. Some funny shots of my clutter and my dishes and my enchilada pan to a nice beat, sort of a laugh to keep from cry situation, surely, uh, and I got a comment. “Lazy.” Yeah, that stung. But I must be a glutton for punishment because I kept posting videos about my messy house. Video after video of all of the weird tips and tricks that I was using to try and get it back in order while managing my feelings of being overwhelmed.

And I braced myself for more criticism. But what happened was entirely different. In the comment sections of my videos, hundreds of stories came rolling in.

[00:02:39] Chris Duffy:
We're gonna dive deep with KC into the stories she's heard as a therapist, her own life experience, and what it means to take care of yourself when it feels like you are drowning in laundry, dishes, and everything else. But first, we're gonna take a short break. We'll be right back after this.

[BREAK]

[00:03:04] Chris Duffy:
We’re talking with the author of How to Keep House while Drowning. KC Davis.

[00:03:08] KC Davis:
Hi, I'm KC Davis. I am an author and a therapist and accidental TikTok personality.

[00:03:14] Chris Duffy:
How did you get into this in the first place? How did you start writing and talking and thinking about the intersection of mental health and care work?

[00:03:23] KC Davis:
Um, the reason I got into mental health is my own mental health issues. And when the lockdowns began to happen, all of a sudden I was totally cut off from that entire plan. And so I just, I found myself, me, my newborn daughter, my not yet two-year-old daughter, we’re in a new city. My husband was working a lot and our house just kind of started crumbling around us, and I started making TikTok videos just kind of as a distraction and made some, like, “clean with me” videos because I have just, like, historically been a very messy person, and I've had to come up with these, like, weird ways to motivate myself to clean, and I never expected the amount of people that really resonated with seeing, “Oh my God, this is, this is what my house looks like. I never see houses like what my house looks like.”

Somebody kind of spoke up and said like, “I feel so much shame about not being able to do these, like, basic adult things.” And that was really the jumping off point of where like my therapist hat came on and I was like, “Well, let's talk about that.” Because this shame around “I find it hard to clean, I find it hard to do laundry, I find it hard to cook for myself,” is not something I'd really heard people talk about a lot.

[00:04:33] Chris Duffy:
What is a care task and, and why do you choose to refer to them as that?

[00:04:38] KC Davis:
So care task is any task that you engage in; typically domestic care tasks, domestic tasks that care for, cares for yourself. So dishes, laundry, cleaning, tidying, organizing. It could be taking your medication, it could be exercising, cooking, you know, if you change in your sheets. Those are all care tasks and the reason that I call them that—I don't call them chores or housework or cleaning—is because chores and housework and cleaning typically feels as though it's an obligation, and if we don't do it, there's something wrong with us or we should be guilty or we should be ashamed and care task refocuses this task. It's not about being good enough or being a real adult or being a good mom or a, you know, whatever. It's about doing something that cares for me.

[00:05:21] Chris Duffy:
I had this moment where, right before the pandemic, my, my wife was dealing with some health conditions and, and was kind of struggling, but was, we were kind of holding on with the help of physical therapy and mental health and all of that.

And then when the lockdowns started, it was like all of the support systems got cut off. She was no longer able to, to take care of herself or the house. And I was the caretaker. And I just remember so clearly this moment where I'm looking at the bathtub and it's dirty. And I just do not have the energy or the time or the ability to, to take care of it. And I, it felt like the physical manifestation of my failure as a partner and a caretaker.

[00:06:02] KC Davis:
Yes. We, we tend to look at that pile of laundry as “There's the evidence of how much I'm failing.” And then because of that, we wanna avoid, like, who wants to sit around with their failure pile? Right? And when we look at the barriers to being able to do these care tasks, there's sort of like two categories.

There’s, like, the category that you are in of environmental stress creating, like, executive functioning difficulties and have, not having enough support. There’s not enough time, there's not enough energy, there's probably a lot of grief going on. There's a lot of worry and anxiety and all of those things is making it difficult for you to do these daily things.

And then there's the category she's in, which is there's a disability that is, you know, physically or mentally or emotionally preventing her from doing these categories of things. And one of the, the reasons that that shame is so deep is because we sort of feel like, yeah, “There are some people out there that, you know, I wouldn't judge for not being able to get their bathtub clean, but I'm not in that category.” Like I, I'm someone who I should be able to do this. I should be able to do this, and because I can't, the only conclusion I'm left with is I just, I must be lazy or stupid or irresponsible, or there's something wrong with me.

[00:07:24] Chris Duffy:
I think that's so profound. It's also, you know, it's so hard to not get caught up in the, the suffering Olympics where you're like, “Well, I'm, I'm not the gold medal of suffering. I still have it so good in so many ways.” But you know, you are suffering in the moment and it's painful and, and brutal. And just ‘cause there are some things that are objectively easier in your life doesn't mean that the things that are painful aren't, uh, also objectively painful.

[00:07:45] KC Davis:
Yeah. And I think a lot of times we're trying to be really respectful. Like, I understand that I do not experience the world the way that many, many disabled people do. There are tons of ways in which the world was built for me, meant for me, easy for me. And so, because I don't experience a lot of the discrimination that people who identify as disabled experience, I sometimes have a hard time wrestling with “So am I disabled? Can I say that I have a disability?”

I'm not trying to put myself in a category that I'm not in. I'm trying to be respectful and, and acknowledge sort of the privileges that I have experienced. Um, you know, and then I find myself, like, crying in my bathtub because of how difficult something was that day that, like, I know other people aren't experiencing.

[00:08:34] Chris Duffy:
I think you're totally right, and I think it comes again from this idea that, like, the ability to take care of these tasks or these issues that, that is a moral judgment and that I, I don't want to put a moral judgment on it when it isn't. I, I think that's, that's kind of a very radical part of your message here, right?

I, I think reading your book, there were moments where I was completely like, “Of course. Of course, that's morally neutral. It's morally neu—if you can't fold your laundry, it doesn't mean you're a good person or a bad person. You're just busy or you're overwhelmed.”

[00:09:03] KC Davis:
We're all in this place of “Who am I? What am I capable of? What am I not capable of? And if I'm not capable of it, why? And is it a legitimate reason? Or is it a not legitimate reason?” Because we have this idea in our head that people who have legitimate reasons for not being able to do something deserve compassion, and people that don't have legitimate reasons, that are just using cop-outs…

I think that the most important part is recognizing that even if you're in what you think is the category of like, “Okay, I guess I'm able, but I can't figure out why I'm not”, it's still true that the best way to motivate yourself is compassion, is self-compassion. You still deserve kindness regardless of why you are struggling with something.

We all deserve compassion from others and compassion for ourselves. And that is actually the best way to begin to move ourselves into a place where we are figuring out what are sort of the ch—the tips and the hacks that can make me experience more motivation, experience more energy, experience adaptive ways to get this task done.

There's this one line in the book where I talk about how I had tried a lot of different self-help things to try and, like, get my life together, but I was always viewing quote-unquote, like, “getting my life together” as some sort of atonement for the sin of falling apart in the first place.

And I think when we approach these, whether it's how to organize your pantry or how to start exercising or, or any kind of habit, you know, when we approach it from this idea of “I'm so disgusted with myself and if I could just get it together like this person in this book, then I'll be lovable. Then I'll be better. Then I'll feel at peace with myself…” And I think when we shift that narrative to actually “As I am today, with whatever weaknesses and foils, like, I am a person who deserves to eat off of a clean dish tomorrow, and like what can I do right now that is accessible to me with my current skill level in order to ensure that I'm being kind to my tomorrow self?”

[00:11:08] Chris Duffy:
We're gonna talk a lot more about how to be kind to yourself, both today and tomorrow, in just a minute. But first, we're gonna take a quick ad break.

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[00:11:30] Chris Duffy:
We’re talking with author and therapist KC Davis about the often quite damaging moral judgments that get put on tasks like cleaning and hygiene. Here's another clip from KC's TEDx talk.

[00:11:41] KC Davis:
When we liberate ourselves from the idea that we are a good person or a bad person with care tasks, we can stop thinking about the right way to do things, about the way that things should be done, and instead start thinking about what we can do with our current barriers to improve our quality of life today. And this is the fun part because you get to customize a life that works for you. My new motto is, “Good enough is perfect… and everything worth doing is worth doing half-assed.”

You have to give yourself permission to do a little, to do it with shortcuts, to do it while breaking all of the rules and replace that inner voice that says, “I'm failing” with one that says “I'm having a hard time right now, and people who are having a hard time deserve compassion.” In my experience, people will exhibit mind-blowing creativity when they are only taught how to speak compassionately to themselves.

[00:12:55] Chris Duffy:
So, can you talk about how you came to your own perspective shift on keeping house, what there was, I think there was a lightbulb moment where you changed the way you thought about it.

[00:13:03] KC Davis:
Yeah. I had, and I, it was actually like several moments, right? Like I remember folding my laundry, and it was the first time in, like, eight months that I ever folded it because I had gotten to that place where it was like, it was the shame pile.

And so I'm folding the laundry and I just sort of realize I'm looking down and it's like these are, these are baby onesies and, like, fleece pajamas. These are things that don't wrinkle. And yet here I am folding all of these things and just kind of realizing like I don't, what did I think was gonna happen if I just didn't fold these?

And I think the real breakthrough moment though was when I made the decision to start organizing my clothes without folding them at all. So I got just like a bunch of little wire baskets and it was like, “Okay, all the kids' socks here, all of my pants here, all of my shorts here, all of his pants here, without folding them.”

And I experienced this, like, massive increase in my quality of life. Like, I can just walk into my closet and get what I want to get and find it. And then there it is. And it was all wrinkled. And whenever I talk about that I don't fold my laundry, there’s always this like, “But then your clothes are wrinkled.”

And the genius part of this is like, “Susan, they were wrinkled before. They were wrinkled in a giant pile that we were stepping on every day.” And, and it was like, we feel as though there's like this order of operations of, like, how we have to solve this. And like, if we can't solve the wrinkled part, we can't do anything else to make it easier.

And it was like, I know I just like, gave up. I can't, I'm gonna move around the “I don't ever fold” barrier and recognize that I can still improve my quality of life when it comes to this, this thing, and now it's so much easier. I do that and I've done that with everything.

[00:14:47] Chris Duffy:
In the book, you even say that you don't believe that laziness is a thing at all.

[00:14:53] KC Davis:
Yeah, I don't, I've never had a client who believes they're lazy or who other people believe they're lazy that when we got kind of to the bottom of what was going on, that we were like, “Yeah, turns out you're a piece of shit.” Like it was never that. It was never like, “Yeah, man, you just like blegh.”

Like no, it’s either there's some, like, mood issues, depression issues, motivation issues. There is procrastination. There's, they're overwhelmed. They don't know how to do something. They are burnt out. They have executive functioning issues. They're in pain physically. They like, on and on and on and on. There's not, like, a clinical diagnosis there. It doesn't exist. I've never seen it in a clinical setting.

The other problem with it is that it's, if it did exist, it's completely subjective. Everyone always tries to argue and say, “Well, I am lazy because like, I know I should do the dishes. I just don't want to.” And I'm like, “Nobody wants to.” Like, not wanting to do something that's not enjoyable is not lazy.

Um, and I bet you could point to tons of things in your life that are not enjoyable that you do. Often what comes up when we talk about, like, I don't believe laziness exists is people will bring up, like, the division of labor. Maybe the mother is shouldering all of the domestic tasks and the, the father is, like, walking by the dirty dishes every day. Isn't that laziness?

And I, I like to be very specific that while I don't think laziness exists, I do think entitlement exists. And what entitlement is, is I, I do believe that there is exploitation. Right? Like a, a dad walks by dishes and doesn't do the dishes not because he's lazy, but because he's comfortable exploiting his wife because he knows “I don't have to do it, ‘cause she will.”

That's different than walking by the dishes and going, “The dishes really need to be done, but, uh, I'd rather eat worms. I'm gonna put it off,” or “The dishes need to be done, but I'm too overwhelmed to think about it or the dishes need to be done. But all I wanna do is get in bed and not be conscious.”

[00:16:48] Chris Duffy:
I'm curious to talk a little bit about this distribution of labor because you know, whether you're in a heterosexual relationship, whether you're not in a heterosexual relationship, whether you're single, I think how we distribute tasks and who does them is one of the really tough parts, and I think this is where a lot of the judgment comes in. Right?

You, you talk in your book about how it can be really hard to ask for help for a task that you're really struggling with, whether that is paid help or whether that is a friend or family member. We feel like we're gonna be judged by them coming over and seeing that the floor is full of crumbs or something like that. How do you recommend that people think about that and how do you think about it yourself?

[00:17:26] KC Davis:
Well, let me start with how I, I don't think you should think about it.

[00:17:29] Chris Duffy:
Okay.

[00:17:30] KC Davis:
Because I, this is how I think most of us think about it. We think about it like, “kay, let's compare what most couples would do if they'd say, “Let's compare how much you work and how much I work”

And not just how much time-wise, but also how much, like, how hard it is. Like, who’s working more and harder? And the problem with that is that you, you're almost always comparing apples to oranges. It almost always involved devaluing someone else's labor and sort of a winner. And so I think it's much more helpful, instead of trying to focus on the work being equal, to focus on the rest being fair.

Because regardless of how hard your job is or how long your job is, everyone deserves to rest. And rest is not sleep. Rest is a nourishing energy-giving activity that you do, whether it's sitting and reading, whether it might be rest is taking a run. It might be that rest is going to coffee with a friend, but the key about rest is that kind of is, has to be there is this sense of time-autonomy, which is a period of time where I can do exactly what I want with that time. And so when we approach it that way and recognize that there's a huge difference in, there's a huge imbalance in who gets rest when we are comparing who works more.

Because working at a job with a paycheck, for the most part, clock-in clock-out. You're off on weekends; you’re off at five or six or seven. Even if it's 10:00 PM, you’re off at 10. Whereas care tasks are cyclical. They are always going. If you're living in a home of any kind of size, especially with other people, there's always something to do.

And so it might be that even if partner A works longer and quote-unquote “harder” than partner B, if partner B is responsible for the lion’s share of the care tasks, partner A is going to have to take on a certain amount of those care tasks so that partner B can have time to be a human being outside of being in complete service to that family.

[00:19:40] Chris Duffy:
Care tasks are not just in the home, right? Like, there’s these types of care tasks and, and things that need to be taken care of. They also really happen in an office, and often, it can be that they always fall on the same employee.

[00:19:55] KC Davis:
Sure. And I think that the other thing that's interesting about that observation, about thinking about the office is that, you know, we could get into a whole conversation about how, uh, women are typically the ones that are asked to, like bring cupcakes and take notes and do these sort of things.

But the other thing that's interesting is that in an office, there are tons of care tasks to be done that we don't even think about because someone is paid to come in at night and do all of those care tasks. Right? Vacuum the floor, empty the trash. It's a space where we're a, we're used to it just being ready and functional for us. And that's not true at home. Like no one's coming at night and doing all that stuff.

[00:20:28] Chris Duffy:
Obviously, one of the, the big moments in people's lives where some of these care tasks and feeling of overwhelm can come to a head, has to do with children, especially young children. I think it's important to also talk about the fact that if you don't have children, you can still be struggling with this and these can still be just as hard.

[00:20:50] KC Davis:
I think it's probably the f—the number one question I get asked about my book, which is, you know, “Will this help me if I don't have kids? Is this just a parenting book? Is this about, you know, having children and that making life hard? ‘Cause I don't have kids, I live by myself in an apartment and I still can't seem to stay on top”—quote, quote-unquote—“of the dishes.

That's why I make it a really a big deal to be explicit that in some ways, care tasks got more difficult after I had children, and in some ways, they got easier. In some ways there was this self-imposed routine that we kind of fell into ‘cause they wake up at a certain time, then they go to school at a certain time, and then they come home at a certain time and they eat at a certain time and they go to bed at a certain time.

There was something about the structure that children imparted that made some parts of care tasks easier for me and made other parts harder. It's not true that you know, if you don't have children, you don't have a valid excuse to not, to, to be struggling with getting care tasks done.

And to your point about, you know, it's not just things in the home. There are these loads of care tasks that are almost invisible labor, right? Like remembering that Valentines need to go to school on Friday or whatever. Or remembering that there are bills to pay or thinking about… We, we had a house once with a door that faced the sun, and we were told like, “Okay, you have to, like, oil this door three times a year, or it's gonna like crack and break.”

Then it's like, “Okay, but like, who's thinking about the wooden door?”

[00:22:25] Chris Duffy:
Who’s oiling our doors?

[00:22:26] KC Davis:
And although oiling the door takes maybe 60 seconds, the mental load of having to remember it, having to remember to buy the lemon oil, having to figure out if you have it or you stored it, having to plan it, having to put it in some sort of system so you don't forget it, like, there's a lot that goes on mentally to prepare for a care task. And so the labor output is not just what you can see with your eyes.

[00:22:55] Chris Duffy:
I will say that I felt a chill run up my spine when you said that doors needed to be oiled, because I was like, “Oh no. Is that yet another thing that I did not know that you have to do to make sure that your living space does not explode?” I think it, it just speaks to different people have different strengths and different things that are overwhelming for us.

[00:23:15] KC Davis:
Yeah. And they, they kind of have, like, their own pros and cons. Right? Like, the stuff that happens daily, I find much easier to create systems fir. But the, the discouraging part of those is the, like, every day again. Like every day.

[00:23:30] Chris Duffy:
Yeah.

[00:23:30] KC Davis:
Like if I don't wanna do it one day, I have twice as much the next day.

[00:23:34] Chris Duffy:
Yes.

[00:23:34] KC Davis:
You know what I mean? So there's that, there's like that aspect of it. And then with the once-in-a-while, tasks, sometimes those tasks have a feeling of productivity to them.

[00:23:44] Chris Duffy:
Yeah.

[00:23:44] KC Davis:
You know, projects are different than care tasks. They can sometimes be care tasks. But this idea that there's a beginning, a middle, and end, and then a product at the end. You never have to repeat it.

[00:23:55] Chris Duffy:
It's like that famous Camus quote, right? “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” He keeps pushing that rock up and down, and it keeps coming down. And you know what? That's life. That's the life that we all live, is you gotta just keep that boulder moving. It's not, uh, it’s not gonna get to the top, and that's okay. I'm not entirely sure that's really what Camus meant, but that's what I'm interpreting it as right now.

[00:24:18] KC Davis:
And that's why I think it's totally valid to go, “I hate this task. So how can I make it easier, or how can I make it more enjoyable?” And for someone like me, like I have ADHD, which I know is a malfunction in the way that my brain processes a lot of things. But one of them is the, the regulation of dopamine, which is like the feel-good chemical. So what happens for me is that, well, you might do something in your house and you feel motivated to do it, and then you tell yourself to do it, and then you do it, and then afterwards, you go, you know, “I feel good that I did that.”

I don't experience any of that. Any of it. I wanna do it. I cannot make myself move. If I make myself do it, every moment that I'm experiencing sucks. And that I don't feel accomplished afterwards. And so I have to find ways to introduce those elements into the care task I'm doing. I have to, I have to have a podcast or an audiobook.

I had to buy myself the, the little air buds that were wireless because if I have something in my brain happening, it's easier for me to do things with my hands that I would rather otherwise find boring. I have to come up with a systematic way to clean a room so that it's the same every time, so that my brain is getting little hits of dopamine from the pattern-making, right, from the little finish lines I give myself.

[00:25:35] Chris Duffy:
Can we break down a couple of care tasks in ways that are, are more doable?

[00:25:38] KC Davis:
Yeah!

[00:25:38] Chris Duffy:
So for someone who's feeling really overwhelmed by cleaning dishes, by, by having this pile-up and, and it's just feeling overwhelming, can you talk me through how you start breaking that down into something that feels more doable and approachable?

[00:25:48] KC Davis:
Yeah. So the first thing we wanna talk about is like, where is the bottleneck? What is the part you hate? So some people will say it's the unloading of the dishwasher that makes me wanna die. Like I don't really mind loading it. I don't even mind rinsing it. I don't mind any of that. I hate unloading it.

And then we'll go, “Okay, what about unloading it do I hate?” And for me, I hate it because there is no system, there's no pattern. It's just rando dishes that you're pulling out, having to make a decision about every single time they come out. And then you're gonna go, “Okay, is there a way that I can make that different? Is there a way I can skip that step? Can I farm it out to my husband?”

And if the answer is “No, I don't have a husband,” or “No, he hates it just as much as me,” okay, well then how can I, how can I reinject some of those, like, um, motivation, sensory pleasure experience into it? And so I might say, “Well, if there weren't as many dishes in there, I wouldn't feel as bad.” When I open the dishwasher and it's full, I wanna die. When I open the dishwasher and there are eight things in there, I feel this full-body sigh of relief and I feel like I can do it. So working backwards, maybe I'm someone who just needs to run my dishwasher more often, even when it's not full.

So let's say it's a different thing, though. Let's say it's when I look at the pile of dishes in my sink—

[00:27:13] Chris Duffy:
Yeah

[00:27:14] KC Davis:
I’m overwhelmed, and I don't know where to start and I all this, and you go, “Okay, well what if you did this step where instead of, you know, just look, loading it straight into the dishwasher, you organized it first?”

Well, what if you come up with a ritual where every night at seven o'clock, when you come home from work, you keep your shoes on and you walk in the door and you walk straight to the kitchen and you put on your favorite playlist, and for 10 minutes you set the clock. 10 minutes, you do dishes, and, and when 10 minutes is done, no matter how many dishes are there, you just, you're done? And that's your ritual for every day.

And we just sort of, like, look at the barrier, figure out how to go around the barrier. If someone says, “I'm just so depressed, I can't get out of bed. I…” Or, “My mother just died. You know, the grief is too heavy.” Then maybe we need to wipe all of that and just go to some paper plates and dishes for a while.

[00:28:09] Chris Duffy:
I think even just hearing this, the many ways that you approach that just now, what are some of the ones that you're most excited about right now that you’ve put into place in your own home to make your own home more functional for you?

[00:28:20] KC Davis:
One of the best things that I did that continues to be the biggest help to my life is having a family closet. Um, I have, you know, me and my husband and then we have two kids. They're three and four. And for the longest time, I was doing what just seemed normal, which was like, okay, you do the laundry and then you put our clothes into our closet, the baby's clothes into the baby's dresser, and the kid and the toddler's clothes into the toddler closet.

Um, and then when the day that I realized like, I'm dressing all three of these people, why am I going to three different areas? That's one of the things I hate about laundry is having to, like, go to a bunch of different places, right? I got, like, an IKEA thing, that was like a low thing, and I put a bunch of baskets in it that were like cubbies, right, square.

And then I put a dressing station on the top of it, and then I just had a bunch of baskets. And so now, you know, when my kids are wanna put on pajamas, they have to go into our closet. So the clothes only come off in the closet, and then they put on their PJs or whatever. And then when in the mornings when they're taking off their PJs to put on school clothes, well they gotta go to the closet to get those things.

And that works for us in the season of life that we're in. And it's so nice to be able to get the laundry and take it all to the same place and literally sit down and put all of it away. And for me, it really comes down to, like, I need to be able to, like, when it comes to reactive care tasks—so a proactive care task is “I need to vacuum, I'm gonna go get the vacuum.” A reactive care task is “My kid just spilled milk. I need to go clean it up.”

Because you can create rituals and rhythms and schedules for those proactive care tasks. What do you do about the reactive ones? Well, you can either ignore them and then create a system for it to be proactive, recognize that for reactive care tasks, if I cannot take care of that within three steps and three seconds, I'm not gonna do it.

So when it came to clothing, I realized that I need to have a laundry basket in every room of my house and in big rooms I need to have several, I need to be able to walk three steps and put it in a basket. If I have to break the flow of my concentration and, and what I'm doing, um, I start to get really agitated, really irritated. I start avoiding doing those things.

[00:30:36] Chris Duffy:
This is a really different way of approaching things like dishes and house cleaning and laundry. How do you handle the other people in your life who ome over and have moral judgments around this or, or express it in a way that feels judgmental to you?

[00:30:55] KC Davis:
There’s no one in my family personally that has those judgments. So the, the majority of the pushback that I get, of the judgment I get is on the internet is people who will comment and say—

[00:31:05] Chris Duffy:
Okay.

[00:31:05] KC Davis:
“You must be lazy. You're just a selfish… You’re a bad mom. You know, your house is disgusting and filthy.” And that's always really interesting because it’s like, you know, I post a lot on my social media channels, but even then, if you were to, like, take them all together, it's like 10 minutes of my life.

I think for me, you know, reorienting to this idea of, like, my life is getting better and my home is getting more functional. Um, so yes, it hurts my feelings when someone says something like that, but functionally it has, like, why would I change just so that, like, someone on the internet had a better opinion of me?

[00:31:45] Chris Duffy:
Right.

[00:31:45] KC Davis:
So if my mother came over and made a comment that hurt my feelings, she might say something judgmental, but she's also a person that, like, if I were to say like, “Hey, it hurts my feelings when you talk about how messy the house is,” she would hear that and be like, “I'm sorry.” Like I, I, a lot of times people are actually trying to help. “You know, sweetie, what if, what, it's a little messy in here. What if we did ABC? What if we… right?”

And so if someone's receptive, sometimes just having that conversation of, “I know it looks gross, but like, you know what, like the thing is, mom, believe it or not, it was actually grosser, uh, before I started this,” but explaining sometimes to someone who is trying to help you saying, “Listen, I, I know that you want to see me in a functional space, and I want you to hear that that's what I want for myself too. I am taking the steps that make the most sense for me, that are the most sustainable for me towards that goal. You know, what I really need, if you wanna help, is X,” and give those well-meaning people, like, something to actually do. You know, there may be a situation where you can say to someone like, “Listen, I, I actually have made progress in being able to keep house a little bit easier.” And the first thing that I did and the most powerful thing I did is I stopped talking to myself the way that you talked to me.

[00:33:00] Chris Duffy:
It’s really powerful. Well, KC Davis, this has been absolutely a pleasure. Uh, thank you so much for our conversation. Thank you for writing this book, How to Keep House while Drowning. I am so appreciative of the work that you're doing and of you making time to be here today. Thank you.

[00:33:15] KC Davis:
Thank you.

[00:33:19] Chris Duffy:
That is it for today's episode of How to be a Better Human. Thank you to today's guest, KC Davis. Her book is called How to Keep House While Drowning. You can find her online at strugglecare.com or on TikTok at @domesticblisters. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and information about my live comedy shows at chrisduffycomedy.com.

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