107: BEST OF: The Color of Care Tasks with Danita Platt
🌟 Taking a Break! 🌟
Hey everyone! I am taking a short break for August to recharge and prepare exciting new content for you. I’ll be back in September with fresh episodes and engaging conversations. Thanks for your support and patience. Stay tuned for what’s coming next!
I’m excited to have Danita Platt on the show today. I didn’t know anyone of color in the field of care tasks until I met her. Her content resonates with me and my views around care tasks, so I hope you’ll enjoy hearing more from Danita!
Show Highlights:
Who Danita is and how she became an expert on gentle care tasks
How our society over the last two generations has moralized care tasks and tied them to the worth of a woman
Why we need to rethink our views about care tasks and “being a good woman” that go back to the founding of the US, historically speaking
How the concept of “invisible labor” has carried over from colonial days even to today
How many white people were able to live the lives they did because of the cheap, exploitable labor of Black women
How the Great Migration happened to move many Black families to northern cities from the South
How the shift happened to push Black (and white) women to work industrial jobs while men were away during the war
How the push is recurring for 1950s homemaking to be viewed as the superior role for women
What we DON’T talk about in the fulfilling life of a homemaker
How Danita chooses to honor the Black women who had to wash clothes, clean house, and cook meals under duress–with no freedom or choice of their own
What Danita would say to women who want to live more joyfully in their homes and experience more freedom and quality of life
Links & Resources:
Connect with Danita: TikTok and Instagram
Mentioned in this episode: Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism
Connect with KC: TikTok, Instagram, and Website
Get KC’s book, How to Keep House While Drowning
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KC 0:00
Dan Hello, you sentient ball of stardust. Welcome to struggle care, the podcast about self care by a host that frankly hates the term self care. We have an excellent guest today. I am really excited. I've been trying to get Danita on this podcast for a minute, because I just love her content and her point of view. And so Danita Platt, would you just say hello to everybody?
Danita Platt 0:26
Hi everybody. Thanks for hanging out with us today. I'm excited to be here. Casey, I really am very excited.
KC 0:31
So the way that I met you was that I had been posting content about home care, self care from my morally neutral perspective. And someone asked me, Hey, do you know anybody that does care tasks like you? And I was like, Yeah, I can make some account recommendations. And I made some account recommendations from people that did, like, auto care, dietitian like that had a similar sort of, like gentle and compassionate view. I didn't want to recommend anyone that had, like, a commercialized self help, you know, like view to them. And I made these recommendations, and immediately it was pointed out to me that every person I had recommended was a white person. And I was like, Oh, you are right. And I was thinking, I don't know any black women or black men or black people of color, or people of color in general, that were talking about gentle care tasks. And when I said that, immediately you were someone that people began to tag in my comment section. And I'm really grateful for that, because I went over and I looked at your content, and I was like, this, is it? This person? I get them. They get me. And so will you talk a little bit about kind of who you are, what your background is, and I love in your bio online, it literally says gentle care strategies. And so tell me who you are and how you came to be doing gentle care strategies. Yeah.
Danita Platt 2:05
So yeah, I remember getting those tags, and I was like, Oh, wow, but I had already been following you. And I was like, Casey is going to handle this with grace that she always does what you did, yeah? So I Gosh, what got me started talking about gentle care was the fact that I had been absolutely overwhelmed trying to take care of my family as a single mom. Some years ago, I went through a divorce, and I was just trying to get the kids up and at 'em, and it was like they were wearing uniforms to school, and I distinctly remember not having clean uniform shirts to send them to school, and just being like, and I was raking myself over the coals about that. And eventually I was just like, This has to stop. So I started, you know, I like to think I started doing what other people do, which is kind of consuming content on care tasks and like how to be able to take care of your family and get things done and work in a full time job and etc. And I started to just feel still really overwhelmed with the sensation of it all, like I still just felt like I wasn't good enough. That's just the best way for me to describe it. And then eventually I was just saying to myself, You know what? And obviously this was undiagnosed ADHD, which immediately kicked me out of the box of all of the boundaries around how to get it done. And I was just like, what works for me? So I started doing little things that worked for me and realizing, how about you just be nice to yourself about this, and that's so mean. And I started feeling better letting go of those standards that I felt like I needed to live up to. And so I have degree in home economics. All of my friends in college, they took to calling me the white Martha Stewart, the black Martha Stewart, rather. And I always felt weird about that. I always went HBCU, you know, but I always felt weird about that statement, because it wasn't even that I was the black Martha Stewart. It was that I didn't want to be Martha Stewart like No, thank you. Not that she's not, you know, for all the folks who love her wonderful it just wasn't something I wanted to be because I wanted something else that let me do what I needed to do. So I kind of wandered over into the idea of gentle care for my own struggles around not feeling good enough to be able to take care of my family as a woman in America and a black woman in America. And so
KC 4:20
I relate to your story a lot about, you know, the first place we go is the internet or books or podcasts or whatever, to reach for, I guess, what could, you know, self help is like the genre, right? And you're looking at the organizing books and the cleaning accounts and and all of these things, and it felt like what was presented was very much an emphasis on being esthetically pleasing on right so that Instagram esthetic and also just like a really romanticized version. And I remember trying things like, I tried to, like home, edit my pantry. I tried to. And I actually love Marie Kondo. Yeah, me too. I tried to follow her book, like, to the t right? I'm trying to think of other things. And sometimes they were just like, general, like, I'm gonna be someone who wakes up at 5am and does this and this and this. Like, this one influencer I saw, and I had that same like, it didn't fit. I didn't stick with it, I tended to do it for a little bit, and I almost felt like I was like cosplaying an adult that had their life together. And then when I stopped doing it, I felt as though it must be because I failed. I didn't try hard enough, and I found myself in the same position you were in before I knew I had ADHD, also of sort of just realizing, okay, maybe I need to figure out, sort of like rhythms and rituals and ways to be about my house that serve me, instead of worrying about, like, making myself into the type of person that just like floats around their house, Martha Stewart style. So I really relate to that. So I love a couple of the tiktoks that you have made. And you know you mentioned, like, as a woman in America, and I have have been having conversations for a while about like, when I say care tasks are morally neutral, people will say, like, why is it? Why do we have such a moralized view of care tasks. And just from my own experience, I've talked a lot about, you know, well, as a woman, I'm not even two generations removed from the generation that if you were not good at domestic care tasks, you probably weren't going to get married. And if you're not married, you're on the street, and how our families had sort of passed down this messaging about how important it is as a woman. But what I have learned is that that's not the end of the story about why care tasks are so moralized. And there was this viral video on Tiktok recently, where this mom had cleaned her house, and it looked beautiful, and she had this audio to it, and it literally said, if you're not cleaning your house, literally all day, every day, then you're not a good mom. You're not a good wife. Your husband should be able to come home and to a clean house. And it was not parody, like she meant it, and you had this incredible stitch where you talked about where some of that comes from in our culture, and how it's related to the history of care tasks in America. And I just would love for you to enlighten us about that. Sure.
Danita Platt 7:39
Yeah, so, gosh, all of the stuff that comes it's so so so packed and heavy, and you don't even realize that you're laboring under years and years and years and generations of stuff that people have decided is the way to do something. And when we look at it historically, it really starts with the founding of the country. It starts with the arrival of Europeans here in America. And you know, that happened in waves. So the first wave was that the settlement in Jamestown and the people who arrived were really about finding resources. You know, they're looking for gold. They're looking, how do I capitalism? How do I gather resources at this place? And as we know, they did not think about farming or crops or feeding themselves, and we know how that ended up. That didn't work out. And then we have another group that lands Just a year later, but they land at Plymouth. And what is that Massachusetts? But these folks have a completely different perspective. They really feel God ordained, like this sense of a god assignment. They are hook, line and sinker in that messaging. And they show up thinking, we are here to bring morality, Christianity, not, you know, the first group was like, I'm gonna separate from the church. You know, this group is like, no, no, we're going to redeem the church, you know, here. And they set out with that level of morality. And so you have these two ideas that are now floating around the East Coast, where it's the idea of capitalism and making a way for yourself and sort of bootstrapping to change your circumstances, and you have this idea of my God ordained. The morality part is really super heavy with these people. And obviously in 1619 there's ship that shows up that has 20 some odd Africans on it. They are then this is where we end up with chattel slavery. It starts with indentured but we know it moves quickly to chattel slavery, and specifically the harvesting of tobacco, which is being sent back to England, and it becomes the crop. The cash crop is tobacco. And so now we need more Africans in order to be able to do this. But what's happening? Societally is that we're still and by we, I mean European sellers, Americans now are still living the way that they were living previously, which is housing. And we see all this play out in the architecture. It's housing that's very small. It's not these. When you think like plantations, you think sprawling and mansions and pillars, right? But it wasn't that initially. It was like one or two rums, and everyone is working side by side. So the white woman who is the enslaver, the white man who's enslaver, the Africans who are there. They're all in the field together, harvesting tobacco together. They're all cooking in the same common room in the hearth that's in the common room in the house. So what we end up with is this side by side labor. Well, then we end up with this third wave of folk who show up from Europe, but they are here now. They are aristocrats, they're Gentry. They're of a different class than the original first two groups who showed up, and they arrive with the idea, why are we living with, working beside? Why are we societally structured so that everyone is all in here together, right? If we're going to do racism, we have to learn how to do it, because we weren't doing it before that, not in this way. So we have to learn what that looks like. And so it looks like separating whites from Africans. It looks like changing our architecture so that we don't have to live in the same spaces and places. So all of a sudden now this idea of the work and the care and all of the care tasks that fall in line with what it is to be white in America, black in America, all of that falls to the enslaved population. But there's this idea also attached in there where the work is being done by the enslaved people, but the credit and the essence of it is really to the enslave the enslavers, the people who are enslaving people in this population. So in America, we end up with this incredible moral weight that comes with the way that we organize ourselves. And we've carried it forward in that if I'm going to be a good white woman who takes care of her white family. That is actually being paid forward from the aristocracy idea during the start of the country.
KC 12:29
And it seems like it's part of a carryover from England and Europe, where the class divide over there was very much like if you were, you know, aristocracy, if you were lords and ladies whatever, like, they didn't really work. I mean, they maybe had, like, their investments and things, but they weren't the women baking bread, right? They weren't the men who were, like, tilling soil and, you know, farriers and things like that. They didn't work. So when those people came over, and not only did they not work, but you mentioned like that God ordained. It wasn't like, we're Lords because we earned it. It was like, no, like, our families are better. We were not meant by God to work. We were meant by God to be the land owners. And like, I'm sure there were people who were awful people, but there was also morality in that of like, it's my job to take care of these poor. You know, they don't know better. They live on my land. They pay rent, but I'm the Lord that takes care. And so obviously we move that those people come over and they're not working, but all of their care, right? Their care tasks back in England will be done by servants. Now they're being done by the enslaved population. And I thought it was so fascinating when you talked about how that becomes your status symbol, like, if you have enough servants and enslaved peoples to clean your big house, to cook your big meals, then that is a status symbol for how wealthy you are. And because of that class system brought over from England, the wealthier you are, the more right and moral you must have been in God's eyes for you to have gained that position Exactly.
Danita Platt 14:12
And to that point, the invisible labor is where we find ourselves now, right? Because you would have had invisible labor during that time because we were working together. But now, nope, everyone, you go off into this slave quarters down here, where no one's going to see you. You cook here, not in this kitchen. The kitchen is going to be off the house. All of the labor is done invisibly, and the white woman gets all the credit for all this invisible labor. And today it's unsaid, but it's the cap, the feather in the cap of the white woman who can have her house clean always have these incredibly high standards in her meals and meal preparation, the larger the house, the better. And. She does that effortlessly. It's the invisible. We never see her working like I say all the time, the visual of a sweaty white woman cleaning her house, we don't see that. That's not a thing, right? Because that isn't the messaging, and that is the standard that we find is because whiteness is the standard for everything else. That idea of whiteness is a standard for everything else. It becomes the standard for all women, even though it is really the standard for white women. Does that make like that?
KC 15:30
Yeah, and I heard somewhere that, like, we talk about this idea of, like running a household, running your household, and a lot of, like the Bible Belt will refer to a certain passage in the Bible, talking about like a woman who runs her household and but like running your household used to mean running your team of domestic laborers, right? It was organizing the maids and the cooks, and you know anyone who was working inside of your house, and fast forward, it's like we've retained the same like standards of cleanliness and home cooked meals. And you know, kids with the clean faces like that effortless always put together, but now running your house means you doing it all by yourself,
Danita Platt 16:20
absolutely, and that's new, right? That's like, I mean, that's what, maybe two generations, the whole do it all by yourself. And we see the result of people are exhausted because they're trying to live up to, like you said, the absence of this assistance, this unpaid labor that you have from the days of enslavement to the exploitation of domestic help, you know, up until now, and it just simply doesn't work, because the standard is not reachable. It's not really an attainable standard by any stretch. And I
KC 16:50
remember listening to people talk about how, you know, white families had domestic help, and I think that in my generation right now, when you think about having a nanny or a housekeeper, that sort of seems like something only attainable to like the 1% and I mean partially because, like, what you actually have to pay a nanny today who, like, knows her worth and has, like, labor laws protecting her or him is like, not something that is affordable to even. I think most middle class, upper middle class, right? You really have to be in the six figures to pay someone $50,000 a year to care for your kids, you know, on top of whatever you might be paying for private school and all this. And what was so interesting to me is when I heard someone talk about that, the amount of white people that immediately jumped to well, my family never had help. We were poor. My family never had help. We were poor. And I thought that was really interesting. And so I do not come from like a super wealthy family by any stretch of the imagination. My dad's family was well off, and my mother's family was extremely poor. So I just got curious, and I went to my dad, and I said, Dad, so my grandmother's name was tatten. Did tatten have help when you were growing up? Did y'all have, you know, people that came and helped? And he said, Well, yeah, I had a nanny. So my dad had a black nanny, and we grew up in Dallas, Texas, and she came and helped my grandmother, and, you know, watched him after school, and did all these things. And it was interesting. And my dad's, you know, second thing was, I loved her. So she was, you know, like family to us, and like you have to understand, my family is very liberal. And so it was sort of eye opening to me how close in our family history that was, and not that I don't have like, a moral judgment on it. It's just I would never have considered myself someone who was in that sort of group. And when we talk about, like, white privilege, like part of my life is the way it is because of the type of life my father was allowed to lead, and the life that he was allowed to lead was in part because the life his mother was allowed to lead, and the life she was able to lead was in part because of cheap labor from black women, absolutely. And I asked my mother the same question, by the way, the one that got very, very poor, and because I thought, Well, okay, my dad was a little more well off. And my mom said, so we didn't have anyone permanently, but my mother did have a young Hispanic woman that came after the birth of the children and helped her with the children, and she was with us until my sister, one time over dinner, said a word in Spanish, like past the whatever, and she was fired the next day. And I'm talking poor, very poor. And I was really sort of, it was eye opening to go, even very poor white families mostly could afford. At least some help, yes. So you talk about how the civil rights movement, as we you know, the impact that that had on basically cheap, exploitable labor. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Danita Platt 20:11
Yeah, it's actually yo. Civil Rights Movement absolutely impacted. But even before that, okay, the war effort of World War Two, because so prior to that, we have basically black families are either sharecropping or they are working in the domestic sense. So we see the great migration. Obviously, after the Civil War, we see black families leave en masse. And the great migration actually happens twice, but the first en masse movement out of the south, people end up going either straight up the coast, and so they end up stopping in DC, Philadelphia, New York, right? Or the kind of this diagonal sort of end up in either Chicago or like Kansas. Kansas City becomes a huge place that the black families migrated to and so when you're there, we're also talking about industrialization, tenant house, tenant housing. What are we doing to house all these people? Because we need workers, so people show up. And specifically, I'll speak to DC, because I'm here. This is part of why DC is called Chocolate City, because of the great migration where all of these hotels needed porters and cooks and bus hops and bellboys, etc. All of these families needed nannies and cooks and live in etc. And so there is this, um support network of African Americans who are fulfilling these domestic roles. What ends up happening is, when we're talking about World War Two, the war effort requires workers because the men are gone, so we're going to employ women. Well, prior to that, black women and had to work. It was many laws passed saying the black women absolutely they could not just be home with their children. They were either sharecropping, which is what my family did, or working as domestic help. And this is mainly because white women are complaining, saying, I need help here in the house. My grandmother had slaves. Now they're not, obviously saying it like that, but the point is, she had help. My mother had help, and what I believe is my right is to have help with these I'm not supposed to be overwhelmed with these kids, right?
KC 22:28
And that same messaging is still there for the of I have to have this perfect clean house. So I want to hear more about this, but I'm going to have us pause to hear a word from our sponsors. Okay, we're back with Danita Platt, who is talking with us about sort of the history of care tasks in America, and how that has influenced us today, sort of living under this heavily moralized view of care tasks, and how we're all sort of drowning and we all feel ashamed. And so you were talking about how the women began to sort of demand that they have the help their grandparents had, exactly.
Danita Platt 23:05
And so black women are then, well, now you can't be home. You have to go to work. If you're not working as a sharecropper, then we need to make sure that you're working here domestically in our houses. So but then with the war effort, the men go off to fight, and workers are needed to continue with the war effort. And so that dismantled the working pot of black women who could be in houses providing this domestic care. And so we look up and what black women are now being employed, not just domestically. Now, they can work on in manufacturing. They can work here in this industrial role. And that then completely dismantles the domestic pot that white women were able to reach for. And then we have the white women's feminist movement and all of that. We start looking at things like birth control. White women saying, I need birth control. And I say all the time, I get it. You don't want to have 10 of your husband's children. We understand, right? Because of what all that's going to mean. We
don't want you to either.
We don't want you to hurt so it all lays out into us, not letting go of this concept of our value and our what we are owed as Americans, air quotes, you know that all of that conceptual nonsense, and we haven't let that go, and we're just paying it forward constantly. So
KC 24:36
one of the things that is interesting to me when I sort of look at on the landscape of care tasks, is that particularly kind of the platform that we're on, on tick tock, so there seems to be this resurgent on, at least, you know, the platform we're on, tick tock, where they're calling themselves Trad wives, which stands for traditional wife, and it's typically a. White women, they're often Christian, and they're making content about home, domestic life. It's not like a how to right? It's not like what you and I do. It's just a sort of like picturesque it's almost like trying to bring back the 1950s housewife, and they talk about things like slow living and homemaking as a fulfilling role, and they even go one step further to suggest that homemaking is the superior role that a woman should be in. But like you said, it's never like the white mom with like a ratty t shirt and a vomit stain sweating with the greasy hair being like, yeah, man, taking care of the home is really like the superior place for women to be. No, it's always like some perfectly manicured, thin white woman who's, you know, not wearing a lot of makeup, but is still very like with the Eurocentric beauty standards, like holding a basket of apples right as her like, toddler jumps and puddles. And sometimes they're even, like, living off grid, and she's canning and baking. There's like, beautiful esthetic shots of her baking bread from scratch. And you had, I think, the most, just like the best commentary, where you said, you know, the picture that you're trying to, quote, unquote, bring back of this sort of 1950s housewife where, you know, she's like, so fulfilled, and every moment is sweet, and it's this kind of romanticized idea you said that didn't exist. And you said, specifically, effortless care, task management is a fantasy. And so I'm wondering if you could talk some about that. Yeah, that
Danita Platt 26:48
imagery that you just laid out, like it may be, like, I'm hot, like, I'm sitting here now, like, hot at the thought of it. Yeah, it's frustrating, because it is an absolute fantasy. It never happened because that work was done by black women. It was done by black women during enslavement. When you talk about care tasks in America, okay, so to define a care task, and I'm sure you have a beautiful definition, I'm going to throw mine out there. My definition of a care task is something that doesn't stop it's not a project. It's a care task. Doesn't stop. That's feeding people, clothing people, cleaning, managing dirt, etc. These things are just they're just ongoing. All of those things were done in America by enslaved black women and men, invisible labor. All of that's done there, then it fast forwards into after reconstruction and all that, we still have this work being done by a black workforce. And so in the 50s, there was no version of this white woman, hair perfectly honed, like you said, European beauty standards. She didn't exist. She wasn't a thing. And when you look at their like Pinterest boards and their vision boards for this, it's all 1950s marketing propaganda created by white men working at marketing agencies trying to sell laundry soap like the woman that you're trying to be was not even real. So it never happened when you're attempting to create this Trad life esthetic, what you are saying is, I want to go back to the days of enslavement. I want to go back to the days where, because there's no such thing as doing all of that and not sweating and hair not out of place, like there's no such thing, it doesn't exist. So what we're pining for are days where you had slaves like I don't know how to say it. That is what you're pining for. And interestingly enough, I'm reading this book right now called Sisters in hate, about the white woman's contribution to white nationalism and that Trad life esthetic was started and is the main one of the main pillars of the white nationalist message, which is, and it's white women who are promoting it, white nationalist women who are saying that the way that we're going to save whiteness in America and maintain White supremacy is about white women having white children and promoting triad life. It's interesting
KC 29:25
to me when I think about the amount of white women and men again in those comment sections online that wanted to jump so quickly to my grandmother didn't have anything. We were poor. My grandmother and I think first of all that in a big majority of the case, that's actually not true. But even if, for those percentage of people where that was true, one of the things I'm learning from you is that just because your poor Polish grandmother didn't have servants or enslaved people, she was still. Being expected to live up to Yes, the pressures and the picture of what a woman is and what she does, and that picture was created by white aristocracy, women who had enslaved people
Danita Platt 30:18
exactly yes, and she'll never be able to live up to that. She will always be behind the eight ball. She will always be behind the eight ball, and in the African American community, because, again, whiteness as a concept, as a construct, defines itself as the standard that everyone else is measured against. Then Black women, women of color in America also must rise to the standard of this idea that is held by whiteness, and so no one can live up to the standard. Nobody can be good enough to be able to fulfill that. And that is nonsense. And
KC 30:55
I want to even like take it a step further, because, I mean, I get comments a lot online that say, you know, you're lazy, you're this, you're that. Because I had five kids and kept it clean, my mother had nine kids and kept it clean. And I think that one of the things that is important to remember is that even if a woman managed to pull off doing that like most of us can't do it, but even if a woman manages to pull off doing it, we don't talk about what she had to sacrifice to do that. We don't talk about the fact that she never sat down, that she never had a life outside of the house, that she didn't have an identity outside of her motherhood, that she was disrespected by her husband and her grown children. We don't talk about how and I and I it's they're not happy, and I know they're not happy because they're up in my comment section acting like assholes to me, and happy people that lived a life that was such a romanticized homemaking, fulfilling life, don't go around shaming strangers on the internet. And it's like you can tell that where that anger comes from, and that projection of judging other women is because they succeeded, and the prize they got was a shitty life. There it is. And now they're angry, and they want everybody else to do it too, yes,
Danita Platt 32:20
and that lie tells you that if you can accomplish this, you're going to get whatever wealth, or whatever it is. You feel like you're owed. You're gonna get that. And then when you realize that's never gonna happen, the consolation prize is self righteousness. It is looking down your nose at everyone who can't do it. And it's interesting, because when I'm speaking to a group about gentle care and having this conversation, I know when I have somebody in the audience who has been successful, because I get the stank eye when I start talking like, oh, well, I did it. Yeah, but you're not you're not doing too well, are you? And those weren't great times. Were they? You know, and it's also why I talk about as black women in America. Part of I feel like honoring the fact that when I think about a black woman who was enslaved, she was born, she lived, and she died in enslavement, and she never swept a floor for her own benefit. Her floor was dirt. She never washed a dish for her own benefit. She never experienced anything around a care task that was to the benefit of her or her children or her family or her loved ones she born, lived in doing that. I say as a black woman, I'm gonna not sweep today for all the times that black women swept because they had to, like that's my moment of I'm gonna honor that woman who never washed clothes, because she just that was what was on the list for her to do today, you know, to take care of what needed to be taking it. No She only did it under duress and under constant terrorism. And so that reaching for rest or whatever I do as a care task, being able to do it of my own impetus, I feel like is a moment in celebration of Black women who never had that opportunity.
KC 34:28
That's really powerful. I want to pause there, because I have a question for you when we come back. Okay, so we're back with Danita Platt, and so here's my question, sort of coming to the end of this conversation, so the people that are listening when we're thinking about trying to address our own relationship to care tasks and get to this place where we both have a functional space, but that we're not living to serve our space. And you talked a bit about. You know how you are connecting to your ancestors and using that to empower yourself to sort of break free from this sort of oppressive culture of care, task perfection. And so I'm just curious what you would say, maybe more about that, about if we want to live more joyfully in our homes and experience more quality of life and freedom. It sounds like you can't avoid confronting this cultural history.
Danita Platt 35:39
Yeah, absolutely. I don't think that you can stand in the midst of all of the expectations and all of the stuff that's dumped on you and not address it. I think you have to stop and turn your attention to it, and it's interesting, because the stuff of life demands so much attention. And I always ask myself, like that's so interesting, because it's almost like a constant distraction, so I won't turn my attention to the nonsense behind why. Like, who benefits from me being overwhelmed by inanimate objects? I've talked to a friend of the time, she says, I've asked myself, who benefits from that? And I'm like, Yeah, because how many women went to the grave with whatever was inside of them, and it's just laying out there in a casket. The world never experienced it because she was overwhelmed with inanimate objects. And I feel like that is an important question to ask one. I think the most important question to ask yourself in life is, who am I and then live up to that? And are you a duster? Like is that the answer to that question? Because, if so, then fine dust, all the stuff, right? Because that's who you are. But if the answer to that question is more than I'm a wiper or a duster or a washer, all of the actions that come with care tasks, the answer to that is different. Let's figure out how to manage this stuff so you can get around to that thing, because I want to see it. I'm interested in that. You know what? I mean? I want to celebrate and cheer you on, and I don't want you to take it to the grave. So, yeah, stopping in the midst of it all to answer that question, to ask and answer that question, is incredibly important
KC 37:22
well, and it's the stuff, it's the the stuff that has to be done in order to live. And I think it all comes back to, you know, do I exist to serve my space, or does my space exist to serve me? And, you know, just echoing what you said about like, it's really almost impossible for one person to do every single care task that needs to be done for really just one person, but much just a whole family, while they're now expected to also work 4050, hours a week, right? And at some point we have to make the decision to break away from that narrative that has been given to us,
Danita Platt 38:01
yes, absolutely, and liberate ourselves and free our social net, and ask those tough questions to say, in what way am I not liberated? And then how do I access liberation in that area? Well, this has
KC 38:15
been an incredible conversation, and why don't you take a moment to tell everybody where they can find you if they're interested in following, you sure, so
Danita Platt 38:22
you can find me in Casey Davis's comment section. So I'm on Tiktok. Danita Platt, I am on Instagram. Danita LaShawn Platt, but you can get to Instagram through Tiktok, so come hang out with me over there and I always say, you know, ultimately, my point is, let's take care of each other, so that is the purpose of my of my online presence.
KC 38:48
And your content is great. You have so many practical tips, and you are so approachable. And I just, I love the content that you put out into the world, and I'm so grateful that you made time for me today. Oh, thank
Danita Platt 39:02
you. I appreciate the invitation. And you know I love you know I just hang out over on your page because it's absolute gold. So thank you for what you do. You.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai