Chapter no 22

How to Keep House While Drowning

good enough is perfect

for several months I have gone to bed with my kitchen clean. The secret? I don’t care what my front hallway looks like. It gets to look however it wants. It’s none of my business. My clothes always get put up on washday because I stopped caring if they were folded or

not. And my bedroom feels serene and tidy because I have given the bathroom permanent permission to look like a feral raccoon lives in it. The secret that is allowing me to have a functional home is that I’ve been half assing it all. And it’s better than it has ever been.

This goes against the grain of what most of us are taught growing up.

Perhaps you grew up hearing the saying “do everything with

excellence” (or for those raised religious “do everything to the glory of God!”6). And maybe those phrases have fucked you up a little bit.

Doing things with excellence doesn’t mean doing everything

perfectly. If you go through your whole life thinking that every time you clean the fridge it has to be perfect, every time you take a

shower it has to be perfect, every time you do a work project it has to be perfect, you will burn out and hate your life. But if prioritizing a few good things that really matter to you and aiming for good enough with the rest of it lets you come out at the end of the day healthy and able to experience joy—now that’s an excellent life.

So throw away what you think care tasks “should” look like and

work towards a way of doing them that works for you. The goal is not to do them to Martha Stewart’s standards. Your goal should be to get something functional out of your space. So while doing a pile of laundry may feel like an accomplishment, it is valid to launder three