Shortly after I published my book, I got an email. It said, "Your book was the only thing that saved me from suicide. You saved my life." Now, for a book about how to clean, that's sort of odd, yeah?
(Laughter)
But what if a new approach to cleaning could teach us a better approach to treating mental health?
I'm not an interior designer or a lifestyle influencer. I'm just a therapist with ADHD. And in February of 2020, I had my second baby. Because with the first one, I had some postpartum anxiety and my husband had just taken a very demanding job that was going to keep him busy, I developed a meticulous postpartum plan for myself. My family would rotate in in shifts for the first 60 days. The cleaning crew would come once a month. The new moms group would drop off dinners. And my toddler would go to preschool. I was so proud of this plan, and it ended before it even began.
Because 2020 is when the COVID lockdowns happened and all of that support disappeared overnight. 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.
(Laughter)
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. 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.
(Laughter) 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. Stories like Amanda, who, after losing her baby in the second trimester, was standing frozen at her sink because she forgot how to wash dishes. Stories like Lula, whose chronic health problems and depression made it difficult for her to brush her teeth. Story after story of people with depression, ADHD, autism, burnout, bereavement, all struggling with these daily tasks. And it might seem odd to some of you that someone could struggle with tasks that are so simple. But are they simple?
Let's think about what really goes into something like laundry. Everyone picture your laundry pile right now, OK? How many clean clothes do you have left right now? Can you wash tomorrow, or must it be today? Do you need to prioritize, presort pre-treat anything? Did you grow up with anybody that taught you how to do that? You're out of laundry detergent, if you work three jobs, when are you going to get to the store next? If you get there, can you afford it? And if you can, which one you choose? And you get it all home, get in there, Now pick a setting. Which one? I don't know. Google it. By the way, you have memory problems, so you'll remember that wash in about three days, when it's mildewed into the washer. It's OK, just re-wash it, and get it into the dryer. You'll forget that too, and it'll wrinkle. Now dry it again. Now all you have to do is get it out and fold it. But also you have three small children. And those three small children haven't given you a moment alone in quite some time. When you finally get that moment, you have to decide, are you going to finish the laundry or eat a sandwich or take a nap? Time's up, you didn't do any of it, you stared at the wall. You have decision fatigue because the burden of carrying a home all by yourself has burnt you out.
You see, for some of you, all of the steps and the skills that go into care tasks run on autopilot. But for millions of people, the autopilot is broken. And what's worse, what if you had to do all of that when your mom just died or your job just fired you or you’re using every ounce of strength that you have to just not kill yourself today?
If you have access to therapy, it's unlikely your therapist will ever ask you about your laundry. I've worked in mental health for about a decade. I've been in therapy even longer, and the only time I ever had a provider talk to me about things like cooking and cleaning and brushing my teeth was when I was in a psych hospital as a teenager. Yet here were hundreds of thousands of people in my comment sections telling me that these daily care tasks were a major pain point in their life.
And so I started to wonder, what if we started here? What if we started with these care tasks? Could making daily tasks easier improve mental health quicker?
In the two years that I've been posting and writing about the intersection of mental health and care tasks, I've come up with a philosophy that does just this. And it all starts with one simple idea. Cooking, cleaning, laundry, it doesn't make you a good person. Or a bad person. Listen to me. Care tasks are morally neutral.
Now, I know that if you've been watching Martha Stewart for decades --
(Laughter)
and scrolling the perfect Pinterest aesthetic every day, that it can feel like struggling with these tasks is a moral failure. Like, it's because we're lazy or irresponsible or we're immature. But having an organized closet doesn't make you a success. And living out of a pile of laundry on the floor doesn't make you a failure. You know where the shirt you want to wear is, it just ...
(Laughter)
It might take you a bit of sifting to find it.
(Laughter)
The truth is, it's not about morality. It's about functionality. Does your home work for you? Not some hypothetical houseguest that is coming to inspect your closet.
(Laughter)
I mentioned Amanda, who had lost her baby and forgot how to wash dishes. She told me that when her husband would go to work, she would lay on the floor next to the empty crib and say to herself, "What can I bring to my family if I can't even wash dishes?" But that changed when she began to see care tasks as morally neutral. All of the sudden, the dishes in the sink weren't representations of her failure as a wife, but instead she would look at the pile and think to herself, "What do I need to function tomorrow morning?" And then pull two coffee cups out of the pile to wash. She had her coffee the next morning, and it was a little bit easier to get up off the floor. 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. When Lula realized that her problems with brushing her teeth were not moral failings, she gained the confidence to speak to her dental hygienist, and together they came up with solutions that work around her barriers. She now relies on pre-pasted disposable toothbrushes that she keeps in her desk, floss she keeps in the living room and a no-rinse prescription toothpaste. Because by breaking down the component parts of a dental hygiene routine and ensuring that each step was accessible to her mental and physical needs, for the first time in a year, she's done every step in that routine for two weeks straight. She says that now that her teeth are clean, she's a little less stressed about tomorrow's problems.
And this approach can work with any care task that you struggle with. Simply ask yourself, "What am I trying to achieve and how can I achieve it in my way?" In a rare moment of folding clothes ...
(Laughter)
I looked down at the baby onesie that I was folding, and I thought to myself, "Why am I folding this?"
(Laughter)
Baby onesies don't really wrinkle.
(Laughter)
And even if they did, nobody cares if a baby's in a wrinkly onesie.
(Laughter)
Furthermore, I was probably going to change her four times before lunch.
(Laughter)
This doesn't need to be folded. I said it out loud and literally braced myself for the laundry police? I don't know. There are rules to laundry. But for the first time, I stopped thinking about the way that laundry should be done. And instead, started thinking about how I could make laundry functional for me. And I looked down at the fleece pajamas and the underwear and the athletic shorts and the tank tops and realized almost none of my clothes actually needed to be folded. And I haven't folded any of it since.
(Cheers and applause)
I moved all of my family's clothes into one closet off the laundry room, and now I just toss things into organized bins unfolded.
(Cheers and applause)
My new motto is: “Good enough is perfect.”
(Laughter and applause)
And everything worth doing is worth doing half-assed.
(Laughter and applause)
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."
If it's too hard to shower today, grab the baby wipes. It may not be the normal way to do it, but you deserve to be clean. If it's too hard to cook dinner, get paper plates, heat up something frozen. You’ll go back to cooking and washing another day, but the day is not today. And in the meantime, you deserve to eat. If you're too depressed to do your dishes, get a two-gallon Ziploc bag and keep it in your bedroom. Because if you put a dirty plate into a two-gallon Ziploc bag and seal it, it will keep the bugs away. And it'll be there for you when you're ready to go back to the kitchen. Because you deserve a sanitary environment even if you can't get out of bed. I could share with you hundreds of other genius solutions that people have come up with once they embraced the idea that care tasks are morally neutral. In my experience, people will exhibit mind-blowing creativity when they are only taught how to speak compassionately to themselves.
So what if mental health treatment started here? By shifting the idea of care tasks as these external measurements of your worthiness to just being morally-neutral tasks that you can customize to care for yourself. Because if it's true that regardless of what you struggle with, you are worthy of a functional space, what else might you be worthy of?
Thank you.
(Applause and cheers)
