# Letting Go of the Guilt: Understanding the Functional Problem of Care Tasks >[!example] 22 April 2023 #blog %%[[staring at the crack]]%% Lying in bed I stare at the crack on the ceiling. The sun creeping in from behind the curtains. The sound of my boys chatting away to each other in the next room. Playing. Happy. I have to feed them. Get Dexter to school. Tidy the house. Sort the washing. Tasks that are normally completed on autopilot. And yet I can't move. A darkness suffocates me. Deep. Twisted. Hollow. Numb. My autopilot is broken. --- It's been 7 years since that time. But I remember it vividly. Especially the crack. How could I possibly look after 2 children when I couldn't even look after myself? The heaviness of the question weighing on me. The house was a mess. The washing was building up. I had forgotten how to shower. Was I irresponsible? Lazy? A bad person? Yes, yes and yes. Struggling with these tasks meant I was a moral failure, right? Even now, even without the depression, there are times when I still feel like I'm failing, when I don't hoover for a while or I remember that I haven't changed the bed sheets for a few weeks. %%[[KC Davis]]%% But after listening to [KC Davis' TedTalk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1O_MjMRkPg), I'm realising that I had it all wrong. > ...having an organised closet doesn’t make you a success. And living out of a pile of laundry on the floor doesn’t make you a failure. You know where the shirt you want to wear is - it just might take you a bit of sifting to find it. **The truth is: it’s not about morality. It’s about functionality.** Does your home work for you? Not some hypothetical houseguest that is coming to inspect your closet. As women we do the majority of the unpaid work. The caring. The cleaning. The cooking. The tidying up. The laundry. Add that to working on our own careers. Improving our health. Staying connected with family and friends. Doing all the shit that we feel we 'should' be doing. And so many tasks that we really don't need to be. We are spinning a million different plates and we feel like a failure when we drop even a single one. Sometimes the housework, the cooking, the cleaning, the laundry gets put on the back burner simply because we don't have systems in place to help when things get busy. %% link to [[Owning the Busy]] %% Hence we have a functional problem. We have a [[Owning the Busy|triage problem]]. We do *not* have a moral problem. So today, take some pressure off yourself. Listen to the TedTalk. Let go of what doesn't need doing. Embrace the idea that care tasks are morally neutral. And as Pink says, "Don't you ever, ever feel, like you're less than fuckin' perfect"