The Octopus Tries to Keep House While Drowning and Has Thoughts About It

a review of KC Davis's book, How to Keep House While Drowning

I'd been seeing references to KC Davis's How to Keep House While Drowning, so I put it on my library hold list, and then forgot about it. It popped up in my app as available this week, so I clicked borrow and began reading, having completely forgotten what it was.

I'm not sure what I was expecting--I hadn't quite realized that it was, as the subtitle says right on the cover of the book, "a gentle approach to cleaning and organizing." I kind of suspect that I originally thought it was a novel, actually, because the title and cover both seem more like fiction than nonfiction. Certainly not something that belongs on the shelf next to Martha.

And yet... It's not really just another home organization book. It's more like an introduction for how to think of both yourself and your house in extremely compassionate terms, instead of the harshly judgemental rants that most of us are accustomed to.

The room isn't "a filthy pit" or "trashed." It's just "reached the end of it's functional cycle." It's ready to be reset in order to make it functional again.

They're not "chores," they're "care tasks," a gift to your future self.

And most of all, I'm not "lazy," I'm doing the best that I can, given where I'm at.

One of KC's core messages is that a house doesn't have to be perfectly clean all the time. I'd come to realize that myself, but it had taken years. I'd grown up where a room was either dirty or clean, with nothing in between. If it was dirty, you should be cleaning it. If it was clean, you should be keeping it that way. I don't particularly enjoy cleaning, since I'd rather be reading a book or doing almost anything else, so nothing in my orbit remains clean for very long. And although I can ignore a mess for a long time, I still know it's there. And I know that I "should" be cleaning it up.

It's the "shoulds" that trip me up.

KC gently helps to reframe how we look at ourselves, how we look at our situations, how we look at our homes. Be soft, be gentle, be quiet. Most of all, be compassionate--we're doing the best we can, even if it seems like not much from the outside.

After the last few years, I'm ready for the self-compassion that she teaches. Probably I'm not the only one.