About Those Cutesy “One Size Fits All” Solutions to Mental Health Challenges…

This morning, after I had taken my morning meds and gotten dressed, I laid back down on the bed for a bit. I played my daily online sessions of Solitaire, Wordle, Quordle, Squareword, Waffle, Cookie Jam, and WordStacks. Yes, I have a little morning goof-off routine – I mean, I do generally get up between 4:30 and 5:00 a.m., people… so I have the time… and autistic peeps like me DO love a wee bit of routine! After my games, I did my morning Facebook scrolling. During this time, I ran across one of those “suggested” posts that the Almighty-Powers-That-Be at Meta seem to think I’d like to see in my news-feed. In my general laziness today (I’m in a flare – deal with it) I’ve posted a screenshot of it below…

The poster did go on to put a brief credit to someone called Kate Scott, so I truly hope this person is the one to be credited here…

Now, I don’t know Kate. Kate is very likely a lovely person for all I know, and I feel sure they truly meant well with all of this BUT…

Can we please take a moment to sort of dissect this and address some potential pitfalls of this “rainbows and unicorns”, all too convenient, one-size-fits-all solution to their initial problem? A problem, I might add, that is assuredly well-known amongst those of us who suffer from mental health issues. I’ve written about them before – our illustrious “Activities of Daily Living” or ADL for short. ADLS are very basic things like being able to wash ourselves, brush our teeth, use the toilet, be mobile, etc… Kate’s specific issue falls under the heading of IADLs, or Instrumental ADLS. MANY of us with chronic pain/illness and/or mental health issues struggle with these things. These are regular activities that most people just… DO… with no problem whatsoever. Things like shopping, financial management, meal prep, communication with others (email/telephone/written), managing medications, housework, etc…

Let me just go on record as saying that I am absolutely ELATED that this little revelation by her therapist seemed to be just the cure that Kate needed to be able to move on with her life. I also want to say that things like that DO happen. People have revelations. It’s wonderful when it happens! Sometimes we DO find obvious solutions to complex problems in the simplest of terms. But… I’d go out on a limb to say that most of us are NOT having these kinds of epiphanies every day.

Back to the initial problem at hand… What if you have no dishwasher? I do have one. It’s practically brand-new as it’s only been run a couple of times since I moved into this house brand new a little over 15 years ago. However… Dad and I soon discovered that our water pressure here in the sticks was not strong enough to successfully use a dishwasher of any kind. Those dishes would not come clean no matter HOW many times that sucker ran – and the electricity and water wasted for us to come to this conclusion was nothing to scoff at. So… for the past 15 years, all dishes at Chez Janni have had to be washed by hand, in the sink, the old fashioned way. Now that you have this information, consider this…

I was mostly bed bound for about 4.5 years, and trapped on the upper level of my house (before we had a stair lift). The few dishes I would dirty upstairs had to be washed in a bathroom sink. That sink was very shallow with barely any room to fit a dish under the faucet to properly wash and rinse. I was living with pain levels near an 8 out of 10 on the regular (and sometimes worse). A lot of times, dishes would stack up on the side of my bathroom counter top and I would do one or two at a time, as and when I could muster up the strength. I mostly ate off of paper plates (I am environmentally friendly, however, so I did use compostable ones). Now that I *am* able to come and go from upstairs to downstairs and vice-versa, I can access the kitchen sink. It isn’t easy from a wheelchair, but thankfully I AM now able to stand for the short time it takes to wash a handful of dishes. But even so… I still have my days when I am unable to do this. Frustratingly, my OCD battles it out for control of my brain alongside the pain and fatigue… and there are days when it is a REAL struggle to see which one will win. I absolutely HATE leaving dishes in the sink overnight! It is a true pet peeve of mine. Sometimes though, I have to make my peace with it. I absolutely DO wash them when I can though, and am thankful for the times I feel able.

All of that to say – Kate’s therapist’s nice little “tied up with a bow on top” solution to simply “wash the dishes twice” just doesn’t cut it in my world.

We can most definitely extend this to laundry as well. There have been times over the past year when I would put a load of clothes in to wash in the morning before I went downstairs for the day. I tend not to make lots of trips up and down the stairs throughout the day, due to a rickety stair lift that is barely hanging in there and is ready to give up the will to live at any time now (we were really hoodwinked on that purchase!). As I am not physically able to climb steps, that stair lift is my lifeline, so to speak. I have to be conservative with its use. But there have absolutely been those times after I put the wash on in the morning, that by the time I went back upstairs in the evening, I was in too much pain, or was far too fatigued after just being “up” all day in my wheelchair, to be able to hang the clothes up to dry. I left them right where they were. I didn’t want to. No one wants to have to deal with stinky, wet clothes the next day after they’ve been left in the washer for over 24 hours. Alas… it has happened to me so many times now that I’ve taken to not even starting a load of laundry until I go back upstairs in the evening and have a better grasp of whether or not I will feel like dealing with hanging them on the drying rack an hour later.

Here’s the thing – I lack the financial resources for things like wasted detergent, or for wasted water… or for wasted electricity for that matter… Many folks wouldn’t think twice about it and would just say to themselves “Ah, I’ll just run it again in the morning, no worries…” When it happens to me though, I am RIDDLED with guilt, shame, remorse, and frustration. I can just hear Kate’s therapist saying “Oh, just run the laundry a second time!” Can I just say… therapists tend to make a pretty good wage, so I doubt they have to be concerned with a few extra dollars on their water bill the next month. I also feel like they probably aren’t sweating it on the financial front when they run out of detergent, either. And that’s great! I’d never wish a situation like mine on anyone else! I do, however, wish that people would adopt a more inclusive nature when coming up with these “too good to be true” solutions to problems that they can’t WAIT to share on social media. It’s just not that simple, y’all. It would be awesome if it were, but nope.

Mental health does not have a one-size-fits-all solution. Neither do chronic health and chronic pain issues. We do the best that we can, but we do often struggle with everyday things such as dishes, laundry, etc… I currently have a medium sized “bus pan” (the sorts of plastic tubs used in restaurants to bus tables with) that is full of various dishes from upstairs that I’ve used over the past couple of weeks while I’ve been in this flare. None of them are TOO grubby/smelly – a few empty Tupperware style bowls that had contained frozen portions of soup (thankful for those – very easy to heat and eat), and several mugs that I’d used for tea. Also some spoons, etc… Those all need to come downstairs and be washed, but I have not had the strength or felt like washing them. Since my kitchen is small, and there’s nowhere for them to go downstairs EXCEPT for the sink, they stay in their little bus pan atop my chest of drawers in the bedroom for now.

And ya know what? Sometimes dishes just don’t get done. And sometimes that laundry is left to stink. All we can do is hit the reset button the next day, hope it’s a better one, and try, try again. At least, that’s what I keep telling myself.

Here’s wishing you all happy dish washing and lucky laundering!