TEDxMileHigh 2022

Read The Script:

One month after I self-published my book, I got an email:

“This book was the only thing that kept me from suicide. You saved my life.”

My book is about how to clean.

Weird right?  But what if a new philosophy on cleaning could teach us a better way to approach mental health?

I’m not a professional organizer or a lifestyle influencer. I’m a therapist with ADHD, and in February 2020, I had my second baby. Knowing that I struggled with postpartum anxiety the first time & that my husband’s new job would keep him busy 7 days a week, I created a meticulous postpartum plan for myself: a monthly cleaning service, meals dropped off by a new mom group, preschool for my toddler, family members signed up to help me in shifts for 60 days straight. I was so proud of my plan, but it ended before it even began —when COVID hit.

All that help disappeared. As my isolated days became a blur of breastfeeding difficulties, toddler melt-downs, and, soon, depression, dishes stayed in the sink for days, the laundry pile reached impressive heights, and there was rarely a clear path to walk from room to room. And when I should’ve been catching up on sleep, I was awake in bed, thinking: “Was this a huge mistake? Maybe I’m only capable of being a good mom to one kid.”

I posted a joke about my house-turned-disaster on tiktok one day, you know, sort of a laugh to keep from crying situation. [Adlibs]. I got a single comment: lazy.

Yeah that stung.

I must be a glutton for punishment because I kept posting about my messy house and the weird little hacks I was using to try to get it back in order. I braced for more criticism, but something got something else entirely:

In the comment sections of my videos, hundreds of stories came pouring in. Amanda, who had lost her baby in the second trimester, had been standing frozen at her sink because she forgot how to wash dishes. Lula, who felt deep shame because her depression and chronic illness meant she rarely brushed her teeth. Story after story like these of people with depression, ADHD, burnout, and chronic illness.

It may seem odd to some of you that someone could struggle with such “simple” tasks. But are they?

Let’s think about what really goes into laundry. Picture your dirty pile of laundry. How many clean clothes do you have left? Do you have to wash it today or can it be tomorrow? Does anything need to be prioritized, presorted, pretreated? Did someone teach you how to do that growing up?

You’re out of laundry detergent. If you work three jobs, when can you make it to the store next? Can you afford it? And do you have the social skills to enter the grocery store?

Once you’ve loaded the washer, which setting do you use? You pick one blindly. Whoops, your memory is compromised, now three days have passed, you forgot to switch it to the dryer and now it’s mildewed in the washer.

You rewash the clothes, but now you have to find the time to fold it and put it away. But your kids need something RIGHT NOW and haven’t given you a moment alone in some time and when you finally get one you must choose between folding the laundry or taking a shower. TIMES UP You did neither because you have decision fatigue and the mental labor of running a home on your own is burning you out.

For some of you, all of those steps and skills are done on auto-pilot. But for millions of people the auto-pilot is broken. And even worse – what if your mom just died, or job just fired you, or you’re using every ounce of strength you possess to not kill yourself?

Even if you have access to therapy – it’s unlikely your therapist will ever ask about your laundry. I’ve worked in mental health for over a decade, and been in therapy for even longer. the ONLY time I experienced providers address things like eating, cleaning, or toothbrushing was when I was in a psychiatric hospital. And yet here were hundreds of thousands of people telling me this was a primary pain point in their life.

So, I started to wonder, what if we address these things FIRST. Good therapy can take years, but could making these day to day tasks easier improve mental health quicker?

In the two years I’ve been posting and writing about the intersection of mental health and care tasks I’ve developed a philosophy that does just that. And it’s build on this one idea:

Cleaning, cooking, or doing laundry doesn’t make you a “good person” or a “bad person.” Care tasks are morally neutral.

After decades of watching Martha Stewart and scrolling the perfect Pinterest aesthetic, NOT doing these tasks seems like a moral failure: you’re lazy, you’re irresponsible, you’re selfish, you’re immature. No wonder we feel so guilty taking a day off!

But having an organized closet doesn’t mean you’re a “success,” and having a giant heap of unfolded clothes on the floor doesn’t mean you’re a “failure.” You know exactly where the shirt you want to wear is – or maybe it takes a bit of sifting to find it. It’s not a matter of morality but functionality. Is your home functional? For you? Not some hypothetical guests that MIGHT show up and inspect your closet one day in the future.

I mentioned Amanda, who, after losing her baby, would at the sink frozen, trying desperately to remember how to wash dishes. While her husband was at work, Amanda would lay next to the empty crib and think, “What do I bring to my family if I can’t even wash dishes?” But all of that changed when she started seeing dishes as morally neutral. Instead of seeing the dishes as proof she was failing, Amanda began looking at her sink and thinking, “What do I need to function tomorrow?” and then washing two coffee cups for her and her husband to use the next morning. Getting up off the floor by the crib has become a little easier now.

Once you’ve liberated yourself from being a “good or bad person” you can also forget about doing things the quote-unquote “right” way. How you SHOULD do it in a perfect world. Instead, ask yourself – what CAN I do – given my current barriers – to increase my quality of life today?

This is the fun part – because you can get creative. You can customize your life to suit you and no one else.

When Lula stopped seeing her struggles with brushing her teeth as something to be ashamed of and instead gained the confidence to speak with her dental hygienist, who helped her with solutions that move around her barriers. She now relies on pre-pasted, toothbrushes she keeps at her desk, floss she keeps in her living room, and prescription toothpaste that doesn’t require rinsing. By making each step in the routine accessible to her physical & mental needs, for the first time in a year she has done all the steps in a dental hygiene routine every day for two weeks. She says now that her teeth look better, she is less stressed about future problems.

That same thought process can be applied to any care task you struggle with. Throw out the rule book and ask – what am I trying to achieve? How can I do that, my way, in my house?

One day while engaging in a rare moment of folding clothes, I looked down at the baby onesie I was folding and thought, “Why am I folding baby onesies?” I didn’t have an answer. They don’t really wrinkle, and even if they did it’s not like anyone cares if a baby is wearing a wrinkled onesie. I’d probably change it four times before lunch anyways. “These . . . don’t . . . need to be folded,” I said it out loud, bracing myself for . . . the laundry police? I’m not sure. There were rules to laundry, but for the first time, I stopped asking myself how laundry should be done and started questioning in what way laundry could be functional for me. I looked around the piles I was sitting in. Fleece pajamas, sweat pants, underwear, gym shorts. “Almost none of this . . . needs to be folded.”

And guess what? I never folded any of that it again. My family now shares ONE closet, right next to the laundry room, and the majority of our clothing goes unfolded into bins.

My new mottos are “good enough is perfect” and “everything worth doing is worth doing half-assed.” Give yourself permission to do a little, to do it with shortcuts, to do it while breaking all the rules. Replace the inner voice that says, “I’m failing,” with one that says, “I’m having a hard time, and people who are having a hard time deserve compassion. I deserve to function.”

If you can’t shower today, grab the baby wipes. It might not be the right way to do it, you deserve to be clean

If you can’t make dinner tonight, just buy some paper plates, heat up a frozen meal. You deserve to eat.

If you’re too depressed to get out of bed to do the dishes, throw ‘em in a 2-gallon Ziploc bag to ward off bugs until you can. Because you’re a person and you deserve a sanitary environment.

I could give you so many more examples of the genius things I have heard people come up with once they adopted a mindset of care tasks being morally neutral. People will solve their problems with mind-blowing creativity when they are taught to speak to themselves with compassion.

So what if mental health treatment started here? With shifting care tasks from a measure of your worthiness to functional tasks that you can customize to care for yourself.

Because if it’s true that regardless of your struggles, you are a person worthy of a functional space, what else might you be worthy of?

Thank you.

Watch The Video: