Self-Care is Morally Neutral
I recently read and enjoyed How to Keep House While Drowning by KC Davis. It’s a book about housework for people who struggle with housework. That might be because of executive functioning issues, depression, or anxiety. It could also be because you have other commitments that take up your time and energy (like taking care of small children).
Except, the book isn’t really about housework. It’s about reframing the often unhelpful beliefs and ideas we have about what she calls “care tasks.” Most of all, it’s about being kinder to ourselves when things are challenging.
One point she made struck me in particular: that care tasks are morally neutral. She writes, “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.”
As someone who regularly digs through a mountain of clean laundry looking for a single missing sock, this statement was a breath of fresh air. Good news! Struggling to put my laundry away in a timely fashion doesn’t make me a failure.
It also made me think about self-care. We’ve all heard by now (perhaps ad nauseam) that self-care is good for us. It’s something we should practise. What does your morning self-care routine look like? Here’s a list of a million things we can do for self-care, etc.
And yet, sometimes self-care is hard. When we have 139 other things we need to get done that day, sometimes it feels like the easiest thing to push it back until tomorrow. We might have internal stories or beliefs that create resistance to doing it. Whatever the reason, the should behind self-care can become a judgement: I should practise self-care and I’m not. Therefore, I am (bad/lazy/stupid/disorganized/broken/not good at taking care of myself/a failure), etc.
Self-care is a tool. It’s functional. It’s something we use to meet our needs. To use KC’s phrasing: Being good or bad at self-care has nothing to do with being a good person, parent, man, woman, spouse, friend.
Literally nothing.
Self-care is morally neutral. And reminding yourself of that next time you hear the internal narrative about how you’re a failure because you didn’t exercise yesterday? That is self-care.
Photo by Sixteen Miles Out on Unsplash