Kc Davis Quotes

No one ever shamed themselves into better mental health.

You do not have to earn the right to rest, connect, or recreate. Unlearn the idea that care tasks must be totally complete before you can sit down. Care tasks are a never-ending list, and if you wait until everything is done to rest, you will never rest.

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.

Forget about creating a routine. You have to focus on finding your rhythm.” With routines you are either on track or not. With rhythm you can skip a beat and still get back in the groove.

Remember that anything worth doing is worth doing half-assed.

It’s stressful to try to summon up 100% motivation sitting on the couch. Let yourself use 5% motivation to do 5% of the task. Maybe you keep going. Maybe you don’t. That’s ok. Anything worth doing is worth doing partially.

You are not a failure because you can’t keep up with laundry. Laundry is morally neutral.

That is the life-changing result of internalizing that you do not exist to serve your space, your space exists to serve you.

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.

Perfectionism is debilitating. I want you to embrace adaptive imperfection. We aren’t settling for less; we are engaging in adaptive routines

there are actually only 5 things in any room: (1) trash; (2) dishes; (3) laundry; (4) things that have a place and are not in their place; and (5) things that do not have a place.

You don’t exist to serve your space; your space exists to serve you.

You are not required to contribute to be worthy of love and care and belonging. We know this is true because you could be connected to a ventilator unable to contribute anything (and in fact be using lots of resources) and still be a worthy human being. We all have seasons of life when we are capable of contributing more or less than the people around us.

more often than that the message says, “You were so kind and so gentle, it made me feel like I could really do it.” It was the kindness that finally motivated them.

If you go through your whole life thinking that every time you clean the fridge it has to be perfect, every time you take a shower it has to be perfect, every time you do a work project it has to be perfect, you will burn out and hate your life.

thank you for your concern, but I am not taking any feedback on this issue right now.” Or my personal favorite: “The key for me being able to begin to run a functioning home was when I stopped talking to myself the way you are talking to me right now.

You deserve kindness and love regardless of how good you are at care tasks.

When someone demands the benefits of being a part of a family but refuses responsibilities to that family of which they are capable, it’s a form of entitlement that exploits the other members of that family.

Forget about what pop psychology did to the term self-care. All it means is to care for self. Your body, your mind, your space. And here is the great news: You do not have to care about yourself to care for yourself.

Shame is a horrible long-term motivator. It is more likely to contribute to dysfunction and continued cycles of unsustainable practices.

the key to juggling is to know that some of the balls you have in the air are made of plastic & some are made of glass. When you are struggling to function, it’s important to identify what are your glass balls.

There are seasons of life when we just can’t get all of our needs met, but the mental shift of seeing rest not as luxury but as a valid need helps you get creative, or at least validates it’s okay to mourn how difficult life is right now.

Take a look at the history behind the term self-care sometime. Start with googling Audre Lorde. It wasn’t always about yoga and hobbies.

I realized that I only ever wanted to be skinny because I wanted to be loved and happy. But I already have that. Skinny hasn’t seemed very important to me since then.

I so often look back on these seasons of limping through and say to myself with tenderness, “Wow, I was really doing the best I could with what I had.” And that’s the funny thing about doing your best; it never feels like your best at the time. In fact, it almost always feels like failing when you’re in it.

For a lot of people, finding a method that bypasses the most executive functioning barriers or that makes a task a little less intolerable is better than what’s “quickest.” In the end, the approach that you are motivated to do and enjoy doing is the most “efficient,” because you are actually doing it and not avoiding it.

success depends not on having strong willpower, but in developing mental and emotional tools to help you experience the world differently.

Any task or habit requiring extreme force of will depletes your ability to exert that type of energy over time.

Maybe you keep going. Maybe you don’t. That’s okay. Anything worth doing is worth doing partially.

Self-care was never meant to be a replacement for community care.

Imperfection is required for a good life.

A support deficit is not always someone’s fault. There are just some seasons of life we have to limp through.

Being kind to yourself while eating ice cream is healthier than hating yourself while eating a salad.

quit beating yourself up for having a skill deficit when what you really have is a support deficit. Self-care was never meant to be a replacement for community care.9 Striving to “be better” will exhaust the little energy you have, and it’s probably time better spent letting yourself cry and sleep and finding small pockets of joy to keep you going.

Who the fuck are you? Davy, were you on a fucking date?" Kurt wasn't sure how to express the anger coursing through him without an assault charge, and even though the asshole was no longer kissing or touching Davy, he was getting more irate. "What the fuck Kurt?" Ripping his mouth away, Davy panted. "What the fuck are you doing?" "Kissing you." Or perhaps devouring. "What makes it okay for you to kiss me and not Andrew?" The words weren't a simple question, but a sneering mockery. Kurt's anger returned full force and his hands moved to Davy's hair, yanking his mouth back within easy reach. "You're mine," he snarled before shoving his tongue back in Davy's mouth.

here is the great news: You do not have to care about yourself to care for yourself. So many of us have the cart before the horse here: you think you must first like yourself to start being kind to yourself. It actually works the opposite way: caring for yourself is the greatest tool for learning to care about yourself.

Care tasks are morally neutral. Being good or bad at them has nothing to do with being a good person, parent, man, woman, spouse, friend. Literally nothing. You are not a failure because you can’t keep up with laundry. Laundry is morally neutral.

Sometimes you may not get up even with the change in self-talk. But you know what? You weren’t getting up when you were being mean to yourself either, so at least you can be nice to yourself. No one ever shamed themselves into better mental health.

Framing it as kindness instead of failure was the key to being able to wake up and choose to get things done the next day.

Interestingly enough, the subtle shift from obligation to option created motivation for me.

Because you must know, dear heart, that you are worthy of care whether your house is immaculate or a mess.

Shame has never helped anyone's mental health.

Laundry is morally neutral.

you can’t save the rain forest if you’re depressed

believe the moral gut check here isn’t “Am I contributing enough?” but “Am I taking advantage of someone else?

Organization means having a place for everything in your home and having a system for getting it there. “Tidiness” and “messiness” describe how quickly things go back to their place. A tidy person typically returns things to their home immediately whereas a messy person does not.

On a foundation of compassion and rest, with the view of care tasks as morally neutral, rejecting shame and perfectionism, you can begin to explore ways of caring for your body and space that best serve you.

Task initiation barriers usually present themselves as difficulties in transitions. So I’m sitting in a chair and I need to go do dishes, but it’s very difficult to initiate the transition from sitting comfortably in my chair to getting up to do dishes.

Jennifer Lynn Barnes, a YA author tweeted: One time, I was at a Q&A with Nora Roberts, and someone asked her how to balance writing and kids, and she said that the key to juggling is to know that some of the balls you have in the air are made of plastic & some are made of glass. When you are struggling to function, it’s important to identify what are your glass balls. Feeding yourself, caring for your children or animals, taking your medication, and addressing your mental health are all examples of glass balls. Dropping them would have devastating consequences and likely cause you to drop all the balls. Recycling, veganism, shopping local, and avoiding fast fashion are plastic balls. They may be important, but they will not shatter your life if you drop them in the way the glass balls will. Plastic balls will fall to the floor and stay intact so you can pick them up again. Glass balls will not.

the gulf between what we know in our minds and what we feel in our hearts is often an insurmountable distance. In that moment, I couldn’t help but absorb that lie that my inability to keep a clean home was direct evidence of my deep character failing of laziness.

If I viewed a day of screen time and not doing any scheduled care tasks as a failure, it would be a lot harder to “get back into routine.” But I didn’t. Trolls and pj’s day was a day when we were being gentle with ourselves, allowing ourselves to take it easy and rest—a day of kindness. Framing it as kindness instead of failure was the key to being able to wake up and choose to get things done the next day.

It is not uncommon for abusive caregivers to use chores as a manner of punishment and humiliation, as a way to withhold love and inflict pain. This has a profound impact on the little self, and the messaging carries into adulthood. This usually has one of two effects: (1) you avoid care tasks because you see them as punishment and now that you are an adult you can finally get free of them, or (2) you are constantly and even obsessively cleaning because you have internalized the message that you are dirty or failing if anything is out of place.

Most people fear that if they embrace this type of self-kindness, it will simply enable them to stay unfunctional forever. I think this fear is unfounded. I don’t believe in laziness, but even if I did the good news is that self-kindness is extremely motivating. It might be that when you first start giving yourself full permission to rest without guilt you find yourself resting a lot. Maybe that’s what your body and mind need. Research shows that people who report feeling burnout can take months or even years before they start feeling recovered

As you embark on this journey, I invite you to remember these words: slow, quiet, gentle. You are already worthy of love and belonging. This is not a journey of worthiness, but a journey of care... Because you must know, dear heart, that you are worthy of care, whether your house is immaculate or a mess.

Please do not bully yourself into doing care tasks. Shame is a horrible long-term motivator. Most of the time it is paralyzing, compounding the barriers one already has to completing care tasks. This sets up a cycle where the uncompleted task creates shame, which in turn saps motivation and energy, often leading to avoiding the task altogether

watched my house crumble around me. I tried every day to figure out how to take care of both babies’ needs at once, and I went to bed every night haunted by my failure.

Shame is a horrible long-term motivator. It is more likely to contribute to dysfunction and continued cycles of unsustainable practices.

What is one thing you could do for yourself today that would be truly enjoyable for tomorrow you?

But sometimes the “right” way of doing something creates barriers for certain executive functioning skills.

You are already worthy of love and belonging. This is not a journey of worthiness but a journey of care.

Not everything has to be clean at the same time.

But keeping everything done isn’t the point. Keeping things functional is the point because here’s the thing: it will look like that again tomorrow only if I clean it today.

the gulf between what we know in our minds and what we feel in our hearts is often an insurmountable distance.

If care tasks are morally neutral, then having not showered or brushed your hair in three weeks does not mean “I am disgusting” but instead simply means “I am having a hard time right now.

What does help is to just let yourself move as slowly as you need to. No timers. No agenda. You may not get it all done. But you get more done than you would’ve if you hadn’t done anything.

If you have a particularly rude or pushy person in your life, you can use my favorite boundary phrase, which is “thank you for your concern, but I am not taking any feedback on this issue right now.

You do not have to care about yourself to care for yourself. So many of us have the cart before the horse here: you think you must first like yourself to start being kind to yourself. It actually works the opposite way: caring for yourself is the greatest tool for learning to care about yourself. So

marie Kondo says to tri-fold your underwear. The admiral swears making your bed will change your life. Rachel Hollis thinks the key to success is washing your face and believing in yourself. Capsule wardrobes! Rainbow-colored organization! Bullet journals! How many of these have we tried? How many did we stick with? If you’re like me, the answer is probably none.

when you look at very messy space, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Take a few minutes to speak some compassionate words to yourself and take a deep breath. Although it looks like a lot, there are actually only five things in any room: (1) trash, (2) dishes, (3) laundry, (4) things that have a place and are not in their place, and (5) things that do not have a place.

Lots of decisions are moral decisions, but cleaning your car regularly is not one of them. You can be a fully functioning, fully successful, happy, kind, generous adult and never be very good at cleaning your dishes in a timely manner or have an organized home. How you relate to care tasks—whether you are clean or dirty, messy or tidy, organized or unorganized—has absolutely no bearing on whether you are a good enough person.

Summary: Contribution and productivity are not moral values—but nonexploitation and humility are. When someone demands the benefits of being a part of a family but refuses responsibilities to that family of which they are capable, it’s a form of entitlement that exploits the other members of that family. However, having a limited capacity is not the same as being entitled and accepting help is not the same as exploiting others.

All of the thoughts in your head come from you. Sometimes you have angry thoughts about yourself such as, “God, I’m so worthless!” and sometimes you have sad thoughts about yourself like, “I really wish someone could help me and I feel alone.” This exercise is about purposefully preparing to respond to any angry thoughts—either in your mind or in a journal—with something that is kind, the way you would with a friend. If a friend said, “I am so worthless,” you might say, “I think it’s pretty normal to make mistakes. That doesn’t mean you aren’t worthy.” When you think sad thoughts, you can respond the way you would comfort a friend: “I’m sorry you feel alone. It’s okay to cry.” Even though you know it’s still you saying it to yourself and even if you don’t believe it yet, the exercise begins to help you decrease the number of distressing thoughts you have over time.

Dancing for Dopamine There is an old saying that “neurons that fire together wire together.” It simply means your brain can start associating feelings with certain experiences. For example, dance every day to the same happy song with your baby, or your pet, or a friend on facetime. After a week, play that song while folding laundry or doing dishes. Your brain has now associated happiness with your song and will provide the same dopamine reward when you hear it.

If you are in a season of life when there are simply more care tasks to be done than time or energy available to you and you have the means to afford help, it is the most functional thing to do. Does embarrassment stop you? “I could never let a housekeeper see the state of my home” is about as logical as “I could never let a doctor see the state of my health.” And so what if the housekeeper judges you? It is not their mental health you are responsible for but your own.

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

An Ode to Baskets Big baskets, little baskets, clear baskets, wicker baskets, baskets from the Dollar Tree, baskets that I got for free. Baskets of shoes, baskets of books, baskets in all my crannies and nooks. And here’s the key, here’s the trick: the baskets go where the stuff already went. Laundry that ends up on the dining room floor, put a basket there and there’s mess no more. The stress of a cluttered counter easily ends when you put it all in a box or a bin. If you’re feeling fancy you could purchase a basket’s cousin such as a tray or a lazy Susan. My organizational system is, on its face, just putting a basket in the right place.

You know, those single-use masks everyone is wearing in the pandemic are made of plastic too,” my friend Imani Barbarin said to me. Imani is a talented disability advocate who often speaks about the intersection of disability and environmentalism. She pointed out that the acceptable use of plastic is always set according to what a healthy person needs to be healthy (think masks, gloves, plastic prescription bottles, kinesiology tape… even home delivery supplements that individually package your daily vitamins), but when it comes to someone with a disability using plastic, everyone wants to shame them for killing the planet. “You need what you need,” she said to me in a gentle but firm voice. She was right.

How do we respond when someone criticizes the state of our home or tries to “help” us by giving advice that doesn’t really fit? My favorite phrase for well-meaning family is, “I know you want to see me in a functioning environment and I want you to know that I want that for myself also. I am on my own journey to find what works for me and what I need most from you is nonjudgmental support. One thing that could really help me right now is ________.” And then give them a tangible task they can do! “Take these bags of clothes to the donation bin,” “sit with me while I clean my room,” “help me call a cleaning service or make a doctor’s appointment.” Sometimes all our loved ones need is to be redirected to a way they can actually help. If after you give them ways to help they decline, it’s okay to say, “Then the most helpful thing you can do for me is not make comments about my space.

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. For example, the care task of feeding yourself involves more than just putting food into your mouth. You must also make time to figure out the nutritional needs and preferences of everyone you’re feeding, plan and execute a shopping trip, decide how you’re going to prepare that food and set aside the time to do so, and ensure that mealtimes come at correct intervals. You need energy and skill to plan, execute, and follow through on these steps every day, multiple times a day, and to deal with any barriers related to your relationship with food and weight, or a lack of appetite due to medical or emotional factors. You must have the emotional energy to deal with the feeling of being overwhelmed when you don’t know what to cook and the anxiety it can produce to create a kitchen mess. You may also need the skills to multitask while working, dealing with physical pain, or watching over children. Now let’s look at cleaning: an ongoing task made up of hundreds of small skills that must be practiced every day at the right time and manner in order to “keep going on the business of life.” First, you must have the executive functioning to deal with sequentially ordering and prioritizing tasks.1 You must learn which cleaning must be done daily and which can be done on an interval. You must remember those intervals. You must be familiar with cleaning products and remember to purchase them. You must have the physical energy and time to complete these tasks and the mental health to engage in a low-dopamine errand for an extended period of time. You must have the emotional energy and ability to process any sensory discomfort that comes with dealing with any dirty or soiled materials. “Just clean as you go” sounds nice and efficient, but most people don’t appreciate the hundreds of skills it takes to operate that way and the thousands of barriers that can interfere with execution.

You can see this when a thin, white, rich self-help influencer posts "Choose Joy" on her Instagram....Her belief that the decision to be a positive person was the key to her joyful life reveals she really does not grasp just how much of her success is due to privileges beyond her control.

You don't exist to serve your space; your space exists to serve you.

Many self-help gurus overattribute their success to their own hard work without any regard to the physical, mental, or economic privileges they hold.

realized that I only ever wanted to be skinny because I wanted to be loved and happy. But I already have that.

Chores → care tasks Chores are obligations. Care tasks are kindness to self. Cleaning → resetting the space Cleaning is endless. Resetting the space has a goal. It’s so messy in here! → this space has reached the end of its functional cycle It’s so messy in here feels like failure. This space has reached the end of its functional cycle is morally neutral. Good enough is good enough → good enough is perfect Good enough is good enough sounds like settling for less. Good enough is perfect means having boundaries and reasonable expectations. Shortcut:

It’s stressful to try to summon up 100 percent of the momentum to do something while sitting on the couch. Let yourself use 5 percent energy to do 5 percent of the task.

could exhaust myself making it look like a showroom all the time, but then I wouldn’t have time to take my kids to go get Halloween costumes today, or talk to a friend on the phone for an hour, or write this book.

tidy things up not because it’s bad that it’s messy but because it has reached the end of that cycle of functionality and I need to reset it so it can have another twenty-four hours of it serving me.

Perfectionism is debilitating. I want you to embrace adaptive imperfection. We aren’t settling for less; we are engaging in adaptive routines that help us live and function and thrive. Good enough is perfect.

Followed by a few attempts to get back on track, which also fail. I never manage to recapture that initial motivation and in turn give up completely and feel guilty whenever I look at the thing.

If I had spent those seven months telling myself I was a piece of shit every time I looked at that laundry pile, I probably would not have had the motivation to do it despite having the time. That is because if a laundry pile represents failure, and I’m already struggling with a newborn and a pandemic and an energetic toddler, my brain, which is trying desperately to avoid pain and seek pleasure (or at least relief from pain), is never going to give me the green light to lean in to yet another painful experience like spending 30 minutes in my failure pile of laundry. But it’s not failure. It’s laundry.

The truth is that it’s not waste if you are using something to function. Running your sprinklers every day for fifteen minutes is wasting water because that’s more water than your yard needs to live. Grocery stores and restaurants throw out good food daily and that’s wasting food. Not getting a dripping faucet fixed when you can afford to is wasting water. But using something is not the same as wasting something. It’s okay to use a paper plate to eat if you’re depressed and otherwise would’ve struggled to eat at all. Someone with diabetes can use disposable needles and you can buy a fucking prepackaged salad so you eat.

No person can do all the good things all the time and expecting yourself to just sets up an oppressive perfectionism to which no one can live up. Imperfection is required for a good life.

If you have a particularly rude or pushy person in your life, you can use my favorite boundary phrase, which is “thank you for your concern, but I am not taking any feedback on this issue right now.” Or my personal favorite: “The key for me being able to begin to run a functioning home was when I stopped talking to myself the way you are talking to me right now.

chapter 38 your weight is morally neutral feeding your body is a care task. Resting your body is a care task. Taking medication to control health symptoms is a care task. Moving your body is a care task. Physical therapy and other healing activities are care tasks. It’s a wonderful thing to investigate what foods and nutrients help your body function and feel best. But making or keeping yourself thin is not a care task.

There are lots of ways to make your body smaller that will not produce better health.

One night I was lying in bed and cuddling my eighteen-month-old. She was asleep in my arms with her angelic face resting in the crook of my elbow. We were lying next to my husband, a man whom I love deeply and who loves me. On the floor on a little pallet was my three-year-old, a spitfire little sprite who brightens my world. I realized that I only ever wanted to be skinny because I wanted to be loved and happy. But I already have that. Skinny hasn’t seemed very important to me since then.

food is morally neutral you deserve to eat. Nothing you ate yesterday, said today, or have left undone for tomorrow can take away your right to be fed. Your inability to create a nutritiously perfect meal today does not mean your body is better off not eating. All calories are good calories when you’re having a hard time. There are no good or bad foods. There are no right or wrong foods. And I’m gonna say it: there are no foods that are absolutely healthy or unhealthy. Healthy is a wholistic state of being that requires more than just knowing the amount and type of nutrients in the food you are eating. Being kind to yourself while eating ice cream is healthier than hating yourself while eating a salad. Anxiety and perfectionism are not good for your health. At the end of the day, your relationship to food is as much a factor in your health as fueling your body in a way that makes you feel good is.

stare at the fridge with little sentient leg weights hanging on to my ankles,

There is no right way here; it’s simply what is the lower stress option. You get to decide.

you deserve a beautiful sunday