Finding Your Life Raft
Have you ever felt like you’re drowning?
Like even the simplest of tasks are too hard to tackle?
You’re not alone!
One person who has felt that way is KC Davis, a recent guest on Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast. KC is a social media influencer on TikTok and Instagram as well as an author of the best-selling book, How to Keep House While Drowning.
During our interview with KC, we discussed a few of the topics from her book. KC wrote the book when she was going through a rough period in her life. As a stay-at-home mom during the pandemic with a newborn and a two-year-old, no matter what she did, she couldn’t keep on top of the cleaning, cooking, or even simple self-care like showering. It created a lot of shame in her life.
However, she didn’t stay down. She began to realize that there’s more to life than care tasks. These tasks—whether they get done or not—shouldn’t define you as a person, and you shouldn’t feel bad if you don’t complete them.
KC covers this and more in her best-selling book, How to Keep House While Drowning. After reading through the book, there are a lot of great nuggets in it, so I thought I’d share a couple with you today.
“Care tasks are morally neutral”
KC spends a lot time in the beginning of her book talking about how care tasks (cleaning/cooking/self-care) are “morally neutral” tasks. You don’t become a bad person or a good person just because you did or didn’t vacuum today. Creating a neutral feeling around care tasks means you can start trying to remove the shame if you aren’t capable of doing them for any reason.
The “5 things” method
I often talk about the need to break bigger projects into small pieces to make them easier to tackle. KC does a great job of boiling down what it means to clean a room. She says there are only 5 types of things in any space:
Trash
Dishes
Laundry
Things that have a place and need put back
Things that don’t have a place
When it’s broken down this way, just take one thing at a time. It doesn’t even have to be all on the same day! Maybe today you’ll be able to collect all the trash and put it in a trash bag. If that’s all you can do, that’s still a great accomplishment! As time goes by you may find the time and/or energy to move on to the other items, and that’s ok.
I could go on and on about all of the points in KC’s book. It really is a great reference if you find you’re struggling to keep up with care tasks.
The biggest takeaway I hope you get is to approach each day without judgement toward yourself. It might be hard, but you can do hard things!
If you’d like to learn more about how you can organize your space in a way that works for you, I would encourage you to check out my online course, Organizing Your Space Your Way.
Thank you for your time and attention,
-Nikki
