Reading Notes: How to Keep House While Drowning (Part 1)

📚 Quotes + notes from Ch. 1-14

Burnout is no friend to your reading habits. Chronic stress makes it harder to focus on what we’re reading, harder to absorb new information, harder to think critically about its message, and harder to retain any of it long-term.

That’s where Reading Notes comes in. Think of this as Cliff Notes for burnout — if you’re operating at a deficit of time and energy and can’t process an entire book, here’s a TL;DR version for you.

My house is a wreck.

“I cannot wait to spring-clean that closet,” I told Josh when we unearthed the holiday decor from storage in early December. Now all that stuff is piled in corners: ornaments here, wrapping paper there; waiting for me to process the other stuff currently occupying their space.

The uncomfortable truth is my house has been a mess my whole life. My childhood home had four homeschooled kids and three shedding dogs running wildly through, and drifts of clutter covering every horizontal surface. As an adult I swapped the dogs for cats, but they still shed, and there’s still clutter everywhere.

I do not magically have a clean and tidy home after reading How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing. But I do have a kinder, more self-loving way to think about mess, household tasks, and what my relationship with them does or does not say about me as a person.

Keeping house while drowning starts with throwing yourself a life-preserver of self-compassion. The author KC Davis, a licensed therapist, wrote this specifically to help a neurodivergent and chronically ill folks reframe our self-talk around chores care tasks and strategize around executive dysfunction. The tiny chapters are designed to work with short attention spans, while the content alternates between affirming pep talks and actionable advice.

Keep reading for quotes and notes from Chapters 1-14.

This post contains affiliate links to Bookshop.org. Purchases made through these links may earn me a small commission.

Introduction

Care tasks are the “chores” of life: cooking, cleaning, laundry, feeding, dishes, and hygiene. These may seem like noncomplex tasks. But when you actually break down the amount of time, energy, skill, planning, and maintenance that go into care tasks, they no longer seem simple. … Even tasks that appear to be secondhand thoughts to most people—brushing your teeth, washing your hair, changing your clothes—can become almost impossible in the face of functional barriers.

• For me, just the switch here from calling something a “chore” to now calling it a “care task” makes it more approachable for me. But it also gives the action a functional purpose, something Davis talks about more in later chapters.

In my work as a therapist I have seen hundreds of clients who struggle with these issues, and I am convinced now more than ever of one simple truth: they are not lazy. In fact, I do not think laziness exists. 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.

There is an old saying that neurons that fire together wire together. It simply means that your brain can start associating feelings with certain experiences. This means that if a person was in an abusive situation either as a child or in a domestic partnership where cleaning or mess was used as punishment or was the subject of abuse then that person is going to have post-traumatic stress around housekeeping and they may avoid it because it triggers their nervous system.

When barriers to functioning make completing care tasks difficult, a person can experience an immense amount of shame. “How can I be failing at something so simple?” they think to themselves. The critical internal dialogue quickly forms a vicious cycle, paralyzing the person even further. They are unlikely to reach out for help with these tasks due to intense fear of judgment and rejection. As shame and isolation increase, mental health plummets. Self-loathing sets in and motivation vanishes. Sadly, this is often compounded by critical and cruel comments that friends and family make. Being labeled as lazy cements the belief that struggling to complete these simple tasks is, at its core, a moral failure.

You are not lazy or dirty or gross. You are not a failure. You just need nonjudgmental and compassionate help.

I don’t have a program; I have a philosophy: You don’t exist to serve your space; your space exists to serve you. Internalizing this belief will help you a) shift your perspective of care tasks from a moral obligation to a functional errand, b) see what changes you actually want to make, and c) weave them into your life with minimal effort, relying not on self-loathing but on self-compassion.

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.

Our feelings of failure after not living up to the newest self-care movement or organizational system stem from fundamental misunderstanding about what kind of journey we are on. There is a big difference between being on a journey of worthiness and being on a journey of care.

Chapter 1: Care Tasks Are Morally Neutral

When you view care tasks as moral, the motivation for completing them is often shame. When everything is in place, you don’t feel like a failure; when it’s messy or untidy, you do. If you are completing care tasks from a motivation of shame, you are probably also relaxing in shame too—because care tasks never end and you view rest as a reward for good boys and girls. So if you ever actually let yourself sit down and rest, you’re thinking, “I don’t deserve to do this. There is more to do.” This is an incredibly painful way to live.