Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 501: Messiness Is Not a Moral Failing | KC Davis

Episode Date: September 26, 2022

Today we’re talking about an often overlooked source of suffering— housework. There are so many ways in which housework can be a bummer. Maybe we’re feeling guilty about the fact that our place is always a mess. Maybe we’re driving ourselves crazy with obsessive cleaning. Maybe we have relatives who are overly critical about the state of affairs in our home. Maybe gender politics with our spouses and partners is a source of strife. Our guest today, KC Davis, helps deconstruct these often rigid and daunting cultural norms that surround the concept of domestic bliss. As a self-styled anti-perfectionist, Davis has garnered a huge audience on TikTok with more than 1 million followers. She has also written the book, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing. On today’s show, she offers a ton of practical tips that are rooted in self compassion and the dogged determination not to use shame as a motivator when it comes to our domestic lives. In this episode we talk about: One of KC’s slogans,“You don’t exist to serve your space, your space exists to serve you” The difference between what’s “normal” and what’s “functional”. For example, why that pile of laundry on the floor is just fine if it works for youWhy it’s important to think of house work as morally neutral. For example, why doing dishes has nothing to do with you being a good or bad personWhy she doesn’t believe laziness existsThe power of what she calls “category cleaning” Breaking the clean/not clean binaryAnd achieving equitable division of labor around the house Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/kc-davis-501See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, everybody. We're talking today about an often overlooked source of suffering, housework. All right, before you dismiss this as superficial, think about it. There are so many ways in which housework can bring us down. Maybe we're feeling guilty about the fact that our place is always a mess. Maybe conversely we're driving ourselves crazy with obsessive cleaning.

Maybe we have relatives, in-laws who are overly critical about the state of affairs in our home, or maybe the gender politics with our spouses or partners is a source of strife in this regard. Anyway, you get the picture. gender politics with our spouses or partners is a source of strife in this regard. Anyway, you get the picture. The culture has served up all sorts of role models for domestic bliss, including Marie Condo and Martha Stewart. But my guest today has a very different approach.

Her name is Casey Davis. She is a self-styled anti-perfectionist, and she's garnered a huge following, more than a million people on TikTok alone. She's got tons of ingenious and practical tips for everything from the purgatory of your vegetable drawer to the sycophian cycle of laundry. And undergirding all of it is self-compassion or a dogged determination not to use shame as a motivator. It's a terrible motivator.

And shame has crept into our domestic lives in so many ways, especially through that old saw about cleanliness being next to godliness, which we'll talk about in this interview. Bottom line, housework is a surprisingly deep subject. In this episode, we talk about one of Casey's slogans, which is, you don't exist to serve your space, your space exists to serve you.

We'll also talk about the difference between what's normal and what is functional, i.e., why that pile of laundry on the floor, maybe just fine, if it works for you. Why it's important to think of housework, or as Casey calls it, care tasks as morally neutral. In other words, while doing dishes has nothing to do with whether you're a good or a bad person. Why she doesn't believe laziness exists, the power of what she calls category cleaning, breaking down the clean, not clean binary, and achieving equitable division of labor around the house. Okay, we'll get started with

Casey Davis right after this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral. Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the great meditation teacher

Alexis Santos to access the course just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm all one word spelled out okay on with the show. Hey y'all it's your girl Kiki Palmer I'm an actress singer and entrepreneur on my new podcast baby this is Kiki Palmer I'm asking friends family and experts the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad, where the memes come from. And where's Tom from, MySpace?

Listen to, baby, this is Skicky Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. Casey Davis, welcome to the show. Hi, thank you for having me. The pleasure. Let's just start with a little biography. I'd be curious to hear a little bit of your backstory about how did you get interested in this subject of domestic bliss or its opposite.

So it all happened by accident. First of all, a therapist by trade had been a therapist for a while, became a stay-at-home mom with my first. And then when I had my second baby, I had the same plan. I'm going to stay at home with my kids. And I had this entire postpartum support plan for myself because I'm a therapist and I was thinking about these things.

And I had some anxiety with my first. And it kind of fell apart before it even started, because I had my baby three weeks before the pandemic shut down happened. And all of a sudden, the cleaning service and the family trips and the moms groups and all of these things that I had sort of set up fell through and I found myself by myself. My husband had just become a corporate litigator

so he was working all the time. And so here I am with a newborn, a two-year-old, and a new house that we just bought, and everything just sort of starts to fall apart around me. And I started making TikTok videos about it, really not thinking that too many people were going to resonate, and it just exploded. And I've quickly realized that probably compounded by the pandemic, we were all sitting in our houses looking around going, oh gosh, this is overwhelming.

For sure, the pandemic turned up the volume on that, but my sense is that your subject matter is evergreen and its relatability. I'm curious, why do you think that is? Why is this such a resonant issue? I think it's different for everyone. I've noticed that for women in particular, they tend to resonate with it because

we're really taught from a young age that housework is a big part of your identity and your femininity, or as a mother, or as a wife. And so those of us who end up in sort of heteronormative relationships, I think we don't really realize that we're really only a couple of generations removed from when a woman's entire sort of job description, once she got married, was to take care of the children in the house. And many of us still retain some of those perfectionistic ideas, sometimes just subconsciously, that if my house looks a certain way,

if I'm not keeping up with laundry or dishes or if things aren't nice and clean when someone comes over, that reflects as a failure on my part. I completely buy that. And I'll say as a straight guy to use your term heterotinormative marriage, when our house is a mess, I feel some shame, or at the very least, I don't like it, it's uncomfortable.

And I think, I also hear from a lot of men saying that they weren't necessarily raised where they were expected to do housework in their family. And so a lot of men were getting to the age where they had their own places and then going, oh, I don't know that anybody really taught me the skills on how to create and have a home that I'm comfortable in. That function's really well for me.

And so I think that's a part of it. And so I think everyone's sort of at a baseline really resonates with it. And then of course, you add on top any type of period of stress or transition in your life where things get harder. And I think that's one of the things that people really struggle with because it's this constant reminder. Right? You know, if you're having a stressful period at work, it's not just at work that you feel that, but then you come home and your laundry is piled up to the ceiling because you have had time to do that either. And it's like you can't get away from these constant reminders that things are super stressful

or you can't seem to get a handle on it. I think a lot of us have that kind of perfectionism of, I should feel on top of it. I should be on top of it. And we sort of project that meaning onto if things in our space aren't as organized as they should be. It seems like a core part of your message is anti-profectionism. Yes, I mean, my favorite tagline that I use is that you don't exist to serve your space. Your space exists to serve you because a lot of us are sort of stuck in this box where

laundry has to be done a certain way, cleaning should be done a certain way, dishes should be done a certain way, a how should be decorated a certain way. And a lot of us have never really stopped to ask ourselves if we even like things that way, if that works well for us, if that works well with our lifestyle or our family setup or our support needs. And I think it's huge for people. And oddly more profound than you would think when people get the permission to sort of customize their home and their space as a place

that works for them, as opposed to feeling as though their job is to sort of keep up house. How would you make your space work for you? I mean, the things need to be done in order to keep the space habitable. So, I mean, I'm having trouble imagining this reversal. So there's really three shifts that I think people can make to sort of think about this. And first is when we think, and so I refer to them as care tasks. I find that more helpful, verbiage than saying housework or chores or any of that because we want to think about these tasks whether it's dishes laundry making a meal brushing your teeth as Just tasks that you're engaging in to care for yourself. So that's the main point of doing these tasks and When we stop thinking about them as sort of moral obligations that we need to do because that's what a valid adult does, or that's what a good mom does, or that's what a good spouse does.

And just start thinking of yourself as someone who deserves to be cared for. That's kind of the first shift. Because like you said, there are some things that need to be done. And so I encourage people to start thinking about instead of what's right, think about what's functional. Instead of what's normal, think about what's functional. Instead of what's normal, think about what's functional. So it might be normal or right or the way we were taught that you sort your laundry lights and darks

and you wash it on a certain setting and then you dried on a certain setting and then you fold it and then you put clothes away and everybody's individual, closets and dressers. And if you get to a place where you're feeling overwhelmed with your laundry, stressed with your laundry, or you've just got a lot going on in life, the first thing is recognizing like the function of doing your laundry is just to have clean clothes to wear. That's it. Period and a paragraph. And so if you find yourself living out of sort of a pile of clean clothes on

the floor, the first step is realizing, okay, it is this functional for me? And truthfully, some people will say, yeah, it is. Like, I don't actually care enough to put it away. I have other things in my life I'm prioritizing. It really is perfectly functional for me to just have all my clean clothes in a laundry basket. So I have a dirty laundry basket. I have a clean laundry basket. And I have quote unquote, the chair, right, where things go when they're not quite dirty, not quite clean. And I think sometimes we look at things, someone might look at that system and have this kind of low grade shame over like, oh, it's not really the way I'm supposed to be doing laundry. But the truth is, if that functions for you, that's fine. And then other people might

say, you know what, it doesn't function for me because my clothes are kind of wrinkly, or I can't find the clothes I'm looking for, or I don't have the time to be looking for things in the morning. And so they want to ask themselves, well, how can I make it functional? And so just to give you an example of what I ended up doing with my laundry, we're a family of four, has been working a lot, newborn two-year-old, and I went months and months, just kind of living. We were all just living out of this pile of clean laundry because I couldn't find the time and frankly the motivation to fold things and put them away in their various closets. And it's funny because I looked down one day and

realized like I am dressing three out of four people in my family. It makes no sense to go to three different locations to dress people that I'm dressing. That's when I decided I'm just going to move my kids clothes into our ensuite closet and put a changing table in there because that's where we can all go in the morning and start getting dressed. Then I recognized I just actually did a talk and I was talking about looking down at like a baby onesie and going, why am I folding this? And realizing that in this period of my life, I'm mostly in athletic wear. My kids aren't really going anywhere. I didn't actually need to fold most of my clothes.

And I ended up creating a bin system where I just kind of throw clothes into those bins unfolded. And so that's what we have now. We have a family closet, we have a no-fold system, and what's the coolest part of this whole story is that I went from really not getting my laundry done very often, and it being a source of stress to me, to getting my laundry done routinely every week. And now I always have clean clothes. I always know where those clothes are.

And it has been a huge increase in functioning for me. So just if I could restate this, would you back to your tagline about making your space serve you not the other way around? To me, when I first hear that, I envision getting a fleet of robots to tend to all of your needs, but what you're actually saying if I'm hearing you correctly is to create systems that are functional for you. They may be divorced from

the traditional paradigms of the way things should be, but to create a series of systems throughout the house, laundry dishes, cooking, whatever, that is functional to you. Yes. And if that's the goal, as we walk through that, we encounter various barriers as to why that feels difficult, or why we feel like we're not allowed to do that. So, one barrier we encounter is, well, I'm not supposed to do it that way. And I have found that the key to being able to think outside the box about customizing your home is to start

with that idea that care tasks are morally neutral. And what I mean by that is that the way you do care tasks, whether you do them, whether you like them or dislike them, whether you struggle with them, it has nothing to do with being a good person or a bad person. Like laundry is morally neutral. It's just laundry. If your laundry system is producing clean clothes for you and it way that's functional, that is the laundry system for you. And I have a follower one time that this is sort of a lighthearted story, but she said, my husband and I, our favorite

thing to do at night, like our bonding activity is that we sit on the couch together and watch TV. And we love to lay and cuddle, but there's never enough room for us both to lay. So we're always going back and forth and back and forth on whose turn it is. And she said, and we don't have the budget to buy like a big couch where we can both lay down. And she woke up and she sent me this message and she said,

guess what? This morning we moved our bed into the living room. And she was just elated. She was like, people don't come over very often. And even if they do, like, this is what my family loves to do. Like, we want to lay down and watch TV every night. And I just realized this whole time that we're struggling with not being able to fit on my couch when who says that the rules are, I have to have a bed in the bedroom. And so she moved that bed in the living room because that's what made sense for her

family. It's unconventional, but that's making her space serve her. She could have moved the TV into the bedroom. She could have. But there must have been a reason that wasn't functional for her. Yeah, yeah, though I get it. Who am I to judge? I'm just being a wise house.

Just to pick up on your point, though, about messiness not being a moral failing, or as you have said before, mess has no inherent meaning. I would imagine then you are not a fan of that old saw about cleanliness being next to godliness. Ooh, you're about to get me on my favorite topic. This comes up a lot. It's usually as a criticism someone will say to me and so if you'll allow me to nerd out for a minute, I actually had to research where cleanliness is next to godliness comes from. And it was Wesley, who was sort of a famous

minister who did a sermon one time. And he was referring to a part of the Bible that basically says, don't dress in really rich clothing when other people don't have enough to wear, don't eat really lavish meals in front of people that don't have enough to eat. And so he was sort of trying to extoll the virtue of humility and not showing off. And he put as a sort of clarification, I'm not saying don't be hygienic because as we know cleanliness is next to godliness. And so he was basically just trying to put a caveat saying, I'm not saying you should purposefully look slubby, like that's

godly, you can take care of yourself. It's okay to care for yourself and be hygienic. We're really mostly talking about being flashy on purpose to act like you're better than people. And so what happened was there's that little line there, Ivory Soap, who was around at the time needed a new marketing campaign. And they latched onto this little line that came from this sermon and used it as a tagline for ivory soap. And that's how it got really famous. And sort of just as years and years went by, sort of the association to soap and all

of this, it sort of morphed into being less about the permission to take care of yourself as something good and into having a clean space or having a tidy space or having an aesthetically pretty space is something wholly and good and righteous about you. And I think that is, that's one of my favorite sort of bastardizations of where something came from to what it became. And a lot of people who kind of grew up in religious households have genuinely suffered under that phrase because they were told growing up, maybe they were a messy kid

or they had a hard time organizing that cleanliness is next to godliness. Well, if cleanliness is next to godliness then what is messiness? And if you're a kid that's messy and maybe even adult or you've got ADHD or you're kind of a creative person or you know whenever taught you you're kind of a creative person or you know whenever taught you how to organize your space, what kind of message do you internalize

about what that means about you? That history is fascinating and I'm glad you gave yourself permission to nerd out because it's so interesting to see how that phrase was taken out of context and subsequently used as a shame inducing cudgel. I think that's really kind of what is at the core of everything that I talk about is shame. And in my experience shame is the enemy of functioning. Shame really holds us back and shame and perfectionism go hand in hand. And I think what is interesting is when you talk about things like dishes and laundry and it's like well what's so profound about that? And I think what is interesting is when you talk about things like dishes and laundry and it's like,

well, what's so profound about that? And I think what I have found profound is that all of the ways in which we hold this subtle, almost unconscious shame about ourselves in all these areas. And we really can find a lot of freedom and happiness and joy and functionality in our lives by finding those little pieces and sort of letting go of them. It's great to, for example, it's great to find foods that make you feel good and make

your body function, but that's different than going, ugh, I ate fast food today. I feel so much shame. Interesting you brought that up because we've spent a lot of time on this show talking about what is sometimes called the anti-diet or intuitive eating, which is this notion that we should, to the best of our ability, ignore the blaring messages coming at us from all directions from what's often referred to as diet culture about what we should eat, the various rules, how our bodies should look, and instead revert back to while holding a gentle understanding of the basics of nutrition that we should eat when we're hungry and stop eating when we're full and stop trying to measure our bodies against other people's on social media because

that's a fool's errand. This seems like the housekeeping, I know you don't love that word, version of this. Yes. I was greatly influenced by the anti-diet movement a couple years before I began talking about this. And I think it's a continuation of that where the same thing that happens with diet that happens with other various care tasks

is that we find that we're doing a lot to sort of prove to ourselves that we're okay. We're doing okay. I eat okay, I eat right. You know, when the anti-diet movement is about getting rid of these sort of external measurements of goodness and bringing it back to the simple act of caring for your body by feeding it

and trusting your body and sort of putting the care of yourself in the forefront. And I think that we're doing a similar thing here. We're trying to let go of the pressure of Martha Stewart. We're trying to let go of the pressure of sort of that perfect Instagram aesthetic. We're trying to let go of what we think our mother-in-law is gonna say when they come over.

And instead, reprioritize what's important, which is not that you are a good housekeeper or you're a valid adult, but that you're a person who deserves to be cared for even if just by yourself. And that when we put that at the forefront, that informs how we are designing and operating in our home. And it has a huge impact in our overall quality of life. You invoked Martha Stewart. I was worried that it might be a little glib, but I was going to ask you whether you might think of yourself as the anti-Maricondo. It's funny people say that. Am I the anti-Maricondo? I don't think so. I think I'm the anti-Rachael Hollis. Rachel Hollis is a self-help guru

that's done some books. She did a book called Girl Wash Your Face and I've read the book and it's very similar to a lot of other books and movements in the self-help space. That basically what it boils down to is if you cared enough about yourself, you would pull yourself up by the bootstraps, you would try harder, you would perform better. And there's a lot of emphasis on going on a diet, you know, organize your house, wash your face, start exercising, and there's nothing wrong with any of those activities. And they can all be really life-giving. But what I've noticed is that if we don't help the reader, if we don't help our audience, first check in on what kind of journey that they're on, we run the risk of exacerbating their sense of shame. And so if I enter into a self-improvement journey

from a place of worthiness, I want to be worthy, I want to feel like I'm okay, then we end up going on the diet, starting to exercise, cleaning up our house, Marie condoing our clothes, home editing our pantry, and we end up creating systems that maybe didn't have our life and our brain in mind that are sometimes very difficult to upkeep. And we didn't build any new skills

to actually have new habits. And so we do it for a few weeks, sort of cost playing like we're an adult that does stuff like this. We drink our green smoothies. And then eventually those habits start to fall off, and we begin to feel an immense amount of shame about ourselves. And I think that if we back up and help people recognize

that right now at the weight I am, with the messy house I have, with the diet that I eat, with the, how smart I am, whatever it is right now, I'm already worthy. I'm already worthy. I don't need to improve, unless improving will increase the joy in my life

and the quality of life I'm experiencing. And so if we shift from being on this journey of worthiness to just being on a journey of care, we shift from being on this journey of worthiness to just being on a journey of care, that creates sustainable, slow, organic change. And that puts us on a trajectory to experience a better quality of life, not because that makes us better people or more evolved people, but just because it introduces more joy into our life. So the old paradigm is wash your face, organize your kitchen, and then you'll feel good, and you're saying, actually, let's start with working on your fundamental worthiness issues and go from there. Yeah. And then there's a lot that kind of goes into when people will read my book

or sort of watch my TikToks, and they'll say, okay, so I'm having trouble getting my dishes or eating or whatever it is and go, okay, well, what if we started with the idea that you're a person that deserves to wake up in the morning and have a functional kitchen that you know where things are and you can easily make your meal and feed your kids or do whatever you need to do. Like, let's start there. Okay, so what if I believed that I was worthy? Well, for some people, that's kind of what unlocks it. It's like, great, now I feel motivated,

now I know what to do. For a lot of people, they'll go, okay, I feel like I'm worthy, but I still don't have the skills to do that. I still feel overwhelmed when I look at the dishes or I'm still very tired at the end of the day when I've used up all my energy on other things. And that's when we kind of get into that customization that we were talking about earlier, which is how can you customize your space and your

home. And so maybe it's not about doing the whole pile of dishes tonight, but maybe it's about going, okay, what do I need first thing in the morning? Well, I needed least enough dishes to feed myself and feed my family, and I needed least enough room in the trash can to throw away whatever comes from that, and then just starting there. So maybe I have an evening where I have enough time and energy to go clean the whole kitchen, and maybe if I don't have a lot of time and energy, I can still with that mindset of, I'm tired and I'm gonna let myself rest,

but I also deserve to have clean dishes for the morning. And maybe for that night, I just pick out enough of those clean dishes for breakfast and I wash those. And so we have to kind of get out of that all or nothing mindset. And I think that starting in a place of, I'm worthy of having clean dishes

in the morning for breakfast, gets us to a place where we can begin to honor kind of where we are at, what kind of barriers we have, what kind of time and energy and support we have in our lives. And so I think that's a more sustainable way. And I think that leads to less shame, more self-compassion and more self-acceptance versus, okay, I'm going to adopt this new organizational system,

carte blanche, I'm gonna redo everything, I'm gonna buy new organizational things, you know, this is my new routine, and then sort of it falling flat. Much more of my conversation with KC Davis after this. Hey, I'm Aresha and I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wundery's podcast, Even the Rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities

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Let's Avoid Shame approach. I think shame is largely useless, but I can just in my own life. There are times when I've let things get messy and I'm being lazy. I have the capacity to do it. I'm just being lazy. So is there no place here for any tough love? Let's take that in two parts. Number one, I do not believe that laziness exists. Huh. Should we start there? Sure. So let's take that evening. Bring that evening to mind where you said you let things get messy and you had the capacity to do it, but you chose not to. Okay, so I have the capacity to do a lot of things in my life that I choose not to do.

So what makes that lazy and what makes that having different priorities or what makes that choosing to rest or choosing to do something else? I don't know, no, you're making me examine my story. I would say that when someone says, well, I feel like I'm being lazy, I always want to go first for it. Well, is it functioning? And if you go, well, yeah, generally my house functions. And maybe it got kind of messy because ABC.

So like, maybe you had a hard week at work. Maybe you had to go deal with something or whatever. Maybe it was a fun thing. Maybe you went and had fun all weekend and things kind of backed up a little bit. And so you decide one evening, I have the capacity. I could get up and clean the kitchen or do a bunch of laundry to do this,

and I'm going to decide not to. Well, if those things basically still function and this is like an evening out of the blue, I would just say that you made the choice to prioritize something else, which could be equally as important or more important in that moment. Now, maybe you're someone that says,

okay, KC, but I do it every night. Every night, I look at the laundry and I go, I could do it, but I won't. And now it's piled up and now I have no clean clothes and it really stresses me out. Well, at that point, I don't, even, but especially almost there, I don't think we're looking at laziness, right?

Because you're saying, this isn't functioning, and then you go, well, do you want it to function? They go, well, yeah. It's like, okay, well, you want it to function. It's not functioning, and you're staring at it going, I should do that. I should do that, but I'm not going to. Well, if they're saying, I'm not going to,

because I don't care. Well, then we have a motivation issue because motivation is about recognizing the value of something. So they'll go, well, I don't care. Then you get down underneath that and maybe it's why I just don't think that I deserve clean clothes. Or I don't care because I don't see the value in having the clean clothes. My life's fine and my parents pay my bills and I have a job where it doesn't matter. This is just not a value of mine. Or you go, oh, I know it matters, but I'm looking at it

and I just can't make myself get up off the couch. Well, now we have a task initiation issue. And we can talk to that person and through a series of questions, kind of uncover where is that task initiation problem happening from? Because that's a real thing happening in your brain. The ability to assess your environment, figure out what needs to be done, prioritize it,

think of the steps, and then activate behavior to take those steps. Is not a character thing. It's not a thing happening in your character or your maturity level. It's a thing happening in the prefrontal cortex of your brain. And so if you're struggling to accomplish all of those things, then we're looking at something with the brain. And that's when we want to come in and go, okay, so what skills can we bring in and teach you? What support can we bring around you? So that those things will start to fire the way they're supposed to. And do we need to make your environment more accessible to you if that's what

you're struggling on? Because that's basically what happened with the folding. If I'm going to get really kind of nerdy from a psychological standpoint, I've got ADHD. Add that to postpartum depression and the sleep deprivation. I was not able to fold my clothes. There was a serious block on task initiation to do that, not to mention the time energy factor with two little kids. And so what I did was I made my environment more accessible to my barrier by saying, we're going to create a system that doesn't involve folding.

It's the same thing as if I had a broken leg and I'm going, well, my kitchen's upstairs and we're going, okay, well, when you create a more accessible environment here, so you can still function. So as a clinician, as I've talked with individuals, and I've kind of gone down this rabbit hole of questioning, it's kind of a choose your own adventure, right? I've never, at the end of that journey, gone, well, yes,

turns out you're just a lazy POS, right? Like it's never been like, oh, yeah, no, that's just lazy. I just don't think it exists. Okay, that's fair point. Let's get practical here because you have come up with a ton of really interesting little tactics here. And I'm going to start with the one that one of my producers, DJ, really honed in on, but

they're a million. You have a new way to think about the produce drawer. Hold forth if you will. Yeah, so I have this habit, or I have this habit, of I have the best of intentions, right? When I go to the grocery store and I get the produce. And then I come home and I put the produce in the produce drawer, and then I shut the drawer. And then the next week, when it's time to go to the grocery store,

I open that drawer and I get the rotten produce out and I throw it away and I go buy more produce. And when I started to think about this as sort of a morality issue, right, where it's like, oh, I just really need more self-discipline because I'm not really thinking about plan to eat the fruit and veggies. And I tend to like, if I can't see something, it almost like disappears to me. And so I was forgetting that I had this produce, is it kind of gets pushed into the drawer or in the back of the fridge. And recognizing that, okay, I'm not really at a place in my life where I'm ready to like meal plan out meals,

where I'm scheduling that I'm gonna eat carrots at 4 p.m. on a Thursday. Like that would have been one way to solve that problem. But I also recognize that when I'm hungry and I go to the fridge and I open the fridge, I'm just looking for something. And it occurred to me that if I had carrots in my line of sight, I'd probably grab those.

I'd be reminded that I bought it. It would be easy to grab. And so I decided to reorganize my refrigerator. And I realized that I was keeping the condiments in my door. And where everything's you can see it really easily. But when I want a condiment, like I know that I want that condiment and I'll go look for it. And so what I did was I started putting all the condiments in the drawers and that freed up the whole door. And then I started putting all of my produce in the door because they've got those

thin, I call it like front row only space in the door. And I would open up my little carrots and pull a little water and put them in a cup and put them right there. And I would put the blueberries in a jar and I'd put them right there. So now when I would go to my fridge, I would open it my little carrots and pull the water and put them in a cup and put them right there. And I would put the blueberries in a jar and I'd put them right there. So now when I would go to my fridge, I would open it and go, I'm hungry, and I'd go look at all this produce. It's there, it's easy.

I'm remembering it, I'm grabbing it, or I'm gonna make a meal. Oh yeah, I've got that lettuce that I bought. And that was a way of changing my environment that worked so much better than just chalking my inability to remember to use my produce up to like, well, I guess I'm just bad or lazy or whatever it is. And I mean that pretty much changed the way that I eat. Love it. Let's keep moving. What is category cleaning?

So category cleaning is a thing that I devised, honestly, probably at a young age, because I tend to be a messy person, and I love to start projects, and obviously when I had kids, you're doing something, and before you can finish that thing, somebody else needs something else, and so you're moving, you're busy, and this mess tends to accumulate. And when I look at a big mass, I tend to feel overwhelmed. It's like a sea of thousands of things for whatever reason. And you don't want to start because you feel like it's going to take forever. You sometimes don't know where to start. And sometimes you start, but then it seems like it takes hours and hours to get anywhere and you

get discouraged. And so in taking those barriers, what I began to do was look at the sea of items and say to myself, okay, it looks like there's hundreds of items here, but there's not. There are only five things in any room. Only five. There is trash, dishes, laundry, things that have a place that are not in their place, and things that don't have a place. things that have a place that are not in their place and things that don't have a place. And so I would get a garbage bag and I would just start picking up trash and nothing else.

I don't try, try not to touch anything else, I try not to pick anything else up. I'm just throwing away all of the trash. And then I get the trash bag and you tie it off and you set it to the side. And then you're gonna go with dishes. You go around with either a tub or a bucket and you get all of your dishes

and you go put them by your sink and you do not do the dishes, right? Because a lot of times what happens to us is we get distracted and we have to go down these rabbit holes. Then we're gonna go back and pick up all of our laundry, put it next to the laundry bin and not do the laundry. And then we're gonna start to take corner by corner and just put away the items that have a place.

And then if we pick up an item that doesn't have a place, we're just gonna start a pile in the middle of the room. And then once we've gone around the room, now all that's left is this pile of things that don't have a place. Well, at this point is an organization problem, right? We don't have permanent homes for these things. Now I can put on a podcast or a Netflix or call a friend,

do something distracting while going through this pile and maybe there's some things that I can get rid of or donate or sell. And then start to think about, OK, let me find a permanent place in my home for this little knick knack. So that the next time I go through tidying, I can put it back in its place, and it goes quicker. And the value of doing it this way

is that it really takes away all the decision making until the very end, because that's often what feels sort of defeating. That's what takes a lot of time. That's what feels discouraging. And you're not sort of just like picking up something out of the sea and going, what is this? And where does it go? Oh, it doesn't have a place.

Oh, it goes in the other room. Okay. Let's go to the other room. Ooh, while I'm in here, I should really throw some sheets in and we tend to ping pong all around the place when it's hard to stay focused. And then something else you can add is that if you have something that goes to another room, just kind of having a bucket where like, that's where those things go. Because if I can stay in the room

and just walk through my categories, and every time you do it, it gets faster. Because every time you do it, you've made a few more spaces for the things that don't have a place. So that is what I call category cleaning or five things tidying method. Love that as well. Moving on, what I call category cleaning or five things, tidying method. Love that as well. Moving on. What about male and papers?

So I find that when I'm in a period of feeling really overwhelmed. So like if you're listening and you're going, I have, I feel under water. I feel like I'm drowning in my house. I have so many male and papers. Sometimes you have to really get ruthless to start, where I say, unless you are sending me money or asking me for money, I'm gonna have to throw the paper away. Most manuals to things are online, so there's really not a reason to keep a manual. I find that if I have two places on my countertop,

one for actionable mail and one for fun mail, so actionable mail would be things like bills, invitations you need to RSVP to, and then maybe there's a fun pile. This is where I put things like, oh, I got a letter from my grandma. Here's a magazine I really want to look at. Here's a flyer for a coupon

that I might want to go do one day. And I tend to recycle or throw away everything else. And I just get a little cut through it with it. And I try as much as possible to sign up for online bills and notices and automatic withdrawals and things like that to kind of cut that down. And then we keep one accordion file where we have tabs. And you make the first tab is birth, death, and marriage.

So any of your sort of certificates about that. And then your second one is your home and car. And then your third one is pets. Your next one is family and children. And then taxes. And then you have school, and then you have career. So the only things I'm keeping long-term in my house paper-wise are things that are related to those categories. And that's kind of how we're controlling paper in our house. And then if you're a parent, you have to deal with how you keep all of the

creative artwork that comes home, and that's a whole other discussion. Yeah, I know that pain intimately. You also have a system for keeping your car clean. What's that? That is the system of self-compassion, which is where I get into my messy dirty car every day and go, we can't be perfect Casey

and we won't figure everything out. And I drive off into the sunset in my messy car. That's the whole thing. Yeah, no, I haven't figured that one out yet. I still have a chronically messy, awful car. And I just, I honestly, like I stopped trying to fix it. It's morally neutral. It's fine. It can be prioritized at another time in life.

You mentioned self-compassion. It's a super resonant for many of the people in this audience. Say a little bit about your views on self-compassion within this domestic context. Well, I've been really influenced by Dr. Kristen Neff, who does the self-compassion research. And in particular, my personal story, I had a pretty severe drug addiction as a teenager, ended up in long-term rehab at the age of 16. I was there till I was 18. So I'm intimately familiar with what it feels like to hate yourself.

And I think that a lot of the clinicians and providers around me sort of identified that part of this self-destructive behavior in cycles really comes down to how much you hate yourself and that you think you're not worthy. And the push at that time, this was like the early 2000s was, okay, we need to figure out how to have self-esteem. We need to figure out how to like yourself.

And there were all sorts of exercises that I tried to make myself like myself. And they didn't work, right? I remember staring at the mirror at 16 and being like, you're okay today. People like you, you're going to succeed. Like these self-affirmations. And I just, it felt like somebody was trying to get me to believe in Santa again. Like, I couldn't believe something that I did not believe, and I did not believe that I

was worthy. So what I found, so profound about self-compassion, is that it's not about liking yourself, it's not about loving yourself, it's just about learning to give yourself permission to be human. Recognize that the worthlessness that I feel is pretty universal, the pain that I experience, the failure that I experience. It's not unique to me being uniquely unworthy of love. It's a universal human experience and we all feel this way and we're all just people trying to reconcile who we are in a community of people who are also trying to reconcile that. And the goal isn't to try and make myself worthy of being loved. The goal is to recognize with compassion that we are all in the same place and we can choose to extend that compassion and love to each other even though we are not perfect. And then I can choose to extend that compassion to myself as well.

And how would I speak to a friend that was in this position and trying to replace my inner dialogue that was very critical and very hateful and very cruel and perfectionistic with an inner dialogue that spoke to myself the way that I would speak to a friend with compassion. And so that really underlies a lot of my work. And I think it's sort of the other building block. If moral neutrality is part of the foundation to this philosophy, I think self-compassion is sort of the other building block.

A huge plus one on all of that, especially around what I know you refer to this in your book as gentle self-talk. I am kind of making it part of my mission for my next book and an upcoming TED talk where I talk about this quite a bit to get people, especially people who are really skeptical and might find an old notion of gentle self-talk to be utterly barf-tastic, to embrace the notion that there's actually a ton of research

that shows that if you counter program against your inner drill sergeant with the capacity to talk to yourself the way you would talk to a friend or your kid, assuming you have a good relationship with your kid, that can really affect your level of motivation, your stress level, and you can accompany it to just up the cheese level,

with putting your hand on your chest, putting your hand on your heart, giving yourself a hug, all these things that I have, of course, rejected wholesale, initially, but again, ton of evidence to show that this can supercharge the whole thing. So, and like I said, plus one on all of that. Yeah, I think that part of this work is recognizing the critical messages that we give ourselves when we look at our space, when we look at something that's maybe not working in our space.

Because moral neutrality is saying it's not right, wrong, good or bad, it's just working that's maybe not working in our space, because moral neutrality is saying, it's not right, wrong, good or bad, it's just working or it's not working, right? It's just functioning or it's not functioning. And if it's not functioning, looking at how we speak to ourselves in those moments, because I could look at a time when the house is messy, and I choose not to clean it,

and give myself a critical message of, I'm lazy, or I can choose a self-compassionate message. And what is so amazing about self-compassion is that it's accessible. You don't have to lie to yourself. You don't have to go, I am a hard worker. No, you can just say, I'm having a hard time right now. My house is messy, I wish it wasn't. I'm having a hard time right now. My house is messy, I wish it wasn't.

I'm having a hard time with that. I'm gonna choose to rest tonight, and that is a choice that I'm gonna make. And I don't know if it's the right choice or the wrong choice, but I'm allowed to be human. I'm allowed to just make choices. More of my conversation with KC Davis after this. more of my conversation with KC Davis after this.

Some of these vicious venomous messages were sending to ourselves in all areas of life, but specifically in this context. Sometimes we're channeling our parents or other critical family members. Can you say a little bit about that? Yeah, I think a lot of our inner dialogue is heavily influenced by our sort of social upbringing. And sometimes it's children that grew up in abuse that were told if you don't clean it to the way I like it, they were going to be verbally berated. You have the opposite. You have people that maybe grew up in a neglectful environment where there's nothing was functional

and nobody was taking care of their needs and a child deserves a functional environment. But what happens is that they associate that messy environment with danger and neglect. And so growing up, they can sort of internalize this idea that if they create any mess, that's dangerous, that's bad, they don't wanna be like their parent. And so they have a lot of anxiety around mess

and it's difficult for them to sort of embrace imperfection. And then you may have just grown up with someone that made comments like we talked about earlier with cleanliness as next to godliness, or you may have grown up with a learning disorder or with ADHD and been told that you're lazy because you don't intuitively understand how to clean a room because you feel overwhelmed with something. You may be grew up with a grandmother telling you that if you don't learn to cook and clean better than this, no one's going to want to marry you. You may have grown up in an environment where your

family didn't have enough money to make ends meet and experienced a lot of discrimination and had parents say we may be poor but we will be clean and that you really internalized that cleanliness as sort of the highest value that you need to do all the time. And then into adulthood, you're still prioritizing that value, sometimes even over your own self-care. You may have grown up in an environment where your mother was disengaged from you

because all she did was clean. You may have grown up in an environment where your father never did any caretasks around the home and it was always just your mother. And now you've grown up and you're trying to figure out these sort of odd gendered messages about who's supposed to be doing what around the house and having all this, I'm supposed to be doing all of it

or I'm supposed to be doing none of it. I mean, it's just you almost can't overstate how much impact the message is that you get about caretasks, what kind of impact it has going into adulthood. And how do we not act out this internalized external messages? Well, I think the first step is really not even about how do I not act them out because, again, remember when we jump quickly to how do I fix it? How do I not be like this?

How do I change it? Oftentimes, that sort of urgency is around that sort of journey of worthiness. Of, I don't wanna be like this anymore. This is not the way that a person who is desirable should be, and I don't wanna be rejected, I wanna be loved, and so I need to fix myself, so I can be whole so that I'm an acceptable person. And I think instead just taking a beat

to begin to non-judgmentally become aware of when we're telling ourselves those things and asking ourselves, I wonder where that came from. Like, if we can develop a sort of mindful, non-judgmental curiosity about when we are beginning to tell ourselves these things, I think that's kind of the most important thing right now. And later on down the road, you can talk about, okay, I wonder what it would be like if I began to sort of consciously stop, recognize the message, and then think, what else could that mean about me? What is there a self-compassionate way that I can frame this, right? So you might stumble upon the dishes in the sink and your first thought is, ugh, I'm such a failure. And going, oh, that's interesting. Interesting. Okay, well,

what else could this pile of dishes mean? Just could. What else could it mean? It could mean that I've fed my family every day this week. And what's so funny about this is one of the first, and I talk about this in my book, the first TikTok that I ever posted was sort of shots of my messy house and me sort of making a joke about how like, it's not gonna get done and someone calling me lazy. And I remember at the time,

sort of feeling this vague sense of like, other people must be pulling this off, and I can't, and what does that mean about me? But what's so funny is that at the time, I was looking at those dishes and being kind of distraught about the fact I couldn't get them done. That's all I could see was that I could not get these dishes done.

And two years later, I went back and watched that TikTok, and I noticed something. When the shot goes over the sink and all of the various dishes are in the sink, there's a food processor. Like there's like whatever eight parts to a food processor in my sink. Now keep in mind, I had a baby that was less than 12 weeks old

at this time. And what was so funny was that at the time, those dishes brought the thought of, ugh, I'm really failing and falling behind, I can't keep up. Two years later, I looked and the first thought in my head was, what was I food processing at 10 weeks postpartum? What, and if you've ever had a food processor

or done a recipe that involves a food processor, you will know that is not a simple recipe. And I reflected on how two years later, that was what stuck out to me. And I had so much more compassionate sort of stance towards myself. Look at me. Look at me with this brand new baby that I'm struggling to breastfeed with this toddler that can't go outside the house. And I managed to make homemade enchiladas

with a food processor. And I kind of had this like, go me. Like I was still recovering, you know? And it just occurs to me that what if I could bring that moment closer? What if I didn't have to wait two years to look back on myself with kinder eyes? What if it could be two minutes?

What if I could begin to intentionally ask myself, what else could that sink mean about me? What else could that laundry pal mean about me? What else could those boxes in the hallway mean about me? And sometimes they mean something good about me. And sometimes they just mean that I am having a hard time and people who are having a hard time deserve compassion. I agree with your positive version of revisionist history on the sync and the two-year-old TikTok.

Let me just go back to the super practical tip because I suspect people are going to really appreciate these. Can you talk a little bit about the clean, not clean, binary? Yeah. I think that we tend to see caretasks as existing in only two states, done and not done, right? And so if my dishes are all clean and put up into the pantry or the cupboard or whatever, the dishes are done. But if there's like one dish in the sink, all of a sudden dishes are not done. And the reality is that your dishes exist in more states than done and not done. Dishes can be in your cupboard. They can be

currently being used. They can be waiting on the counter for someone to find it. They can be sitting in the sink, being ready to be washed. They can be in your dishwasher and dirty waiting for it to turn on. They can be in your dishwasher and clean. They can to turn on. They can be in your dishwasher and clean. They can be taken out. They can be put to dry. Like there's all these places in this cycle. And that's kind of the third thing. Like caretasks are functional.

Caretasks are cycles. They are cyclical. And the key is not to find the done stage and just hold it there all the time, right? Like I can't have any dust. The dishes always have to be done. The laundry always has to be done. The key is to sort of embrace that it's a cyclical thing and that it's okay for your dishes to be in any of those states at any given time. The key is that I just want to be able to turn those cycles at such a pace that it's functional. So I wanna be moving those cycles quick enough

that it's producing clean dishes for me to eat off of, but I don't wanna be turning those cycles so quickly that I never have time to sit down and rest and enjoy and recreate and do all these things. And so I might have just gotten done doing my dishes. And okay, the dishes are done, and I'll move over to doing the laundry, and get to a place where, oh, all the laundry is done. Well, by that time somebody has eaten, and now there's a dirty dish.

Or by that time, the kids have come home to the playroom, and now it looks like a bomb went off in it. You can go straight in the playroom, and teach them how to straight in the playroom, but by that time, there's dust accumulating in your bedroom. Right? It's okay. and teach them how to straighten the playroom, but by that time, there's dust accumulating in your bedroom. Right, like, it's okay. Whenever I have a clean kitchen,

it's usually because the laundry's a little backed up. And when the laundry is perfectly in place, there's some dust in my bedroom. And when everything is dust-free, the AC filter hasn't been changed. And when I'm on top of all of that, the garage is all filled with boxes. And it's okay for top of all of that, the garage is all full-deboxes. And it's okay for the cycles to be at different stages instead of just looking at my house as clean

and my house is not clean. It's just about, it's my house functional. And if it is, great. And if it's not, well, okay, well, what can we do to adapt the environment to give you some new skills so that you can get those cycles turned quick enough to create a functional environment. One of the skills I think you're referencing there is learning how to clean and quick bursts throughout the day. Yeah, so it's going to depend on who you are. It's going to depend on what you like, what makes the most sense for your personality, for your brain, for your family, for your support system, there are people who are, they find, you know what, I just clean as I go.

I'm someone who if I don't put it down, put it away. Don't put it down, put it away. And that really works for them. And that is a way that they continue to turn those cycles. I am someone who, when I try to quote unquote, clean as I go, or don't put it down, put it away, I end up so stressed out that I cannot enjoy myself. I end up so frustrated that I cannot be

in the present moment with my family. And that's just who I am. That's just who I am. That's my brain. That's the ages of my kids. That's where I am in life. And so for me, I spent so many years thinking that clean as you go, as soon as you make a mess,

clean up that mess, or soon as something needs to be done, go ahead and do it, to touch things once. I spent so many times trying to sort of cram myself into those habits, thinking that those were like the morally superior habits, and that if I could just do those habits, everything would be fine. Instead of recognizing that, if you've gotten to 35, and you've tried multiple times just do those habits, everything would be fine. Instead of recognizing that, if you've gotten to 35 and you've tried multiple times to do those habits

and they're just not working, it's probably not like an issue of you trying hard enough. Those are probably not the habits for you. And I recognized that I would rather just go through my day thinking about what I'm doing, thinking about my kids, thinking about thinking about what I'm doing, thinking about my kids, thinking about whatever fun project I'm doing, and then schedule myself a 25 minute period of time

at the end of each day to kind of shut down the house with my little list of things. And I think that recognizing that it's not about cleaning is just about resetting so that it's functional. Okay, let's talk about gender politics here. You say care tasks have always been political. How do we achieve an equitable division of labor around the house?

So that's a big question. I think that starting with recognizing that if you have been socialized as a man, that you have absolutely been socialized to think a certain way about care tasks. You have been socialized to see things a certain way. You have been socialized to notice things. You have been socialized to internalize what those tasks mean or don't mean about you. And so I think the most important thing when a couple comes together is recognizing

that these differences are there. And I think a lot of times one of the most frustrating things that I hear from men and women who are in heteronormative relationships is, he just doesn't see it. He doesn't see it, right? And the man will go, I truly don't. Like I promise you I don't. And some men are going, I doesn't see it. He doesn't see it, right? And the man will go, I truly don't.

Like, I promise you I don't. And some men are going, I don't see it because they don't care and they're being entitled. But some men are like, I love you and I will do anything to make this work. But like, I don't know how to make myself notice something. I otherwise wouldn't notice, right? It's like, you can't prove a negative sort of thing.

Like, what do you do that? And so I think that making the conversation about division of labor and explicit conversation is much more helpful than having sort of an ambiguous you need to do better, you need to do better, you need to do better conversation. Because if someone doesn't have the skill to notice something, if they don't have the basis of years of socialization

to think about something a certain way, they're not going to then suddenly begin to think about that way overnight. Honestly, the best system out there that I have found is the fair play method by Yvrotsky, where she encourages families to sit down and talk about explicitly every single task that goes into running that family, running that home, and then talk about what the minimum standard of care for those tasks are so that you're in agreement, and then dividing those tasks between you in an equitable way.

That I think that she has the most sort of nitty gritty way to do that. In my book, I really just have sort of one concept that I want readers to start to think about as the beginning of looking at Division of Labor, which is that I think a lot of times when we come together to talk about Division of Labor, the conversation starts with who's working more or who's working harder. And because we assume that, well, we just take these tasks and we just divide them up so

that it's equal. But if you work more harder, then I should take more care tasks. And if I work more harder than you, you should take more care tasks. And the problem with that is that number one, who gets to decide what work is more or harder? Right, like you're often comparing apples to oranges

if one is a lawyer and one works at the bank, or one is a stay-at-home parent and one is a doctor, one's a coal miner and one's a preschool at home parent and one is a doctor, one's a coal miner and one's a preschool teacher. I mean, how do you compare those jobs? Is it just physical hours? Is it emotional labor? Is it mental labor? So I think that's the first mistake is that we want to stop thinking about who is working more and is the work equal. And we instead want to shift our conversation to the question of, is the rest fair? Because even if you work less, make less, and have a quote unquote easier job,

you still deserve to rest. And one thing about the nature of caretasks that is different than the nature of much paid labor is that it is cyclical in nature and it is never done. And so if you are saddling someone in your partnership with the overwhelming majority of daily care tasks, there is never a time when they are permitted to clock out. There is never a time when they are permitted to have time autonomy, to request off, to be able to just walk out the front door because they decided they wanted to go do something.

And this exacerbates when you become a parent. And one of you tends to become the default parent. And it's usually the woman in a CISAT relationship, where the man can wake up on the Saturday morning and go, I need to go to the store and just walk out the door because there's this assumption his wife is watching the children, whereas a mother could never just wake up on the Saturday morning and go, I'm gonna walk up the door because she has to say, will you watch the kids?

I need to go do this. And you put yourself in this position where the rest is not fair, where one person has what's called time autonomy and the other person does not. One person who is laboring 24 hours a day, sometimes in the middle of the night, and one person that is not. And I think that regardless of whether you work in a coal mine or you sit at a desk or you watch children, everyone deserves to rest.

And if you're my partner and I'm noticing that you never get to sit down, you never get to go out with friends. You never get to have a moment to do your hobby at home. As a partner, what that tells me is I need to take some more labor off of your plate so that you have the time, energy, and time autonomy in order to also rest and recreate. Is there anything I should have asked but failed to ask? What a good question. I don't think so. Well then let me ask you this. Can you please remind everybody where to find you on TikTok, the name of your book, your other resources you've put out in the world. Can you just please shamelessly plug everything?

Of course. So a good sort of jumping off place for all things me is my website strugglecare.com. My book is you can get it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Indie Bound, and there are other buttons from my website that you can get it internationally or from other sellers. On TikTok, I am at Domestic Blisters. I post their daily, and then I am at Struggle Care on both Instagram and Facebook. And I think those are the good places to find me for sure. You can sign it from my newsletter and sort of be in the loop about events and appearances and upcoming projects and things like that.

Casey, thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks again to Casey Davis. Thanks as well to everybody who worked so hard on this show. 10% happier is produced by DJ Cashmere, Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justine Davie and Lauren Smith. Our senior producer is Marissa Schneiderman. Kimi Regler is our managing producer, and our executive producer is Jen Poient, scoring and mixing by Peter Bonnaventure of Ultraviolet audio.

We'll see you all on Wednesday for a brand new episode with the great Buddhist scholar and practitioner Viku Bodhi. We're going to talk about how to be aware of your mind states so that they don't own you. how to be aware of your mind states so that they don't own you. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and ad-free with 1-3-plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself

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