You're listening to Life Kit from NPR.

Hey, it's Mariel.

Raise your hand if you think it's a moral failure to leave dirty dishes sitting in your sink for a day.

It's kind of a funny question, right?

I don't know anybody that would say yes, but if you ask someone, do you feel shame if you leave your

dishes in the sink for too long? A lot of people say yes. I mean, it's true. Sometimes it feels

like the dishes are silently judging me from across the room. Same goes for that dusty bookshelf

and the unfolded laundry that's constantly giving me the side eye.

That was Casey Davis, by the way.

She's a therapist, and she wrote a book called How to Keep House While Drowning,

a gentle approach to cleaning and organizing.

She says the problem is that when we think of chores as a moral obligation,

but we aren't doing them, it's easy to spiral. I'm just not responsible.

I'm just not mature. I'm just not good enough. I just don't work hard enough. I'm just lazy.

When you believe that that's the issue, the only solution to that is try harder, be better.

But I have found just clinically as a therapist and in speaking to other therapist friends, like, that's almost never the issue. Maybe you're dealing with a chronic

illness, or you have ADHD, or you work two jobs, or you're a parent, or you're just tired from life.

The good news, and this is the other message of the book, you don't exist to serve your space.

Your space exists to serve you.

Yes, there's still labor that needs to be done, but it takes off the pressure of how it's supposed to look and how it should be done.

Because then the only thing that actually matters is whether my house is functioning and whether I'm able to live the kind of life I want to inside of it.

And once you understand that, you can start to think of cleaning as a kindness to yourself.

...