Dirty dishes on the counter

One thing I do which annoys my partner sometimes, is that when I empty the dishwasher and refill it with the dirty dishes that have accumulated on the counter, I do not always put every dish away or in. I mean this distinctly from, sometimes I don’t do the entire job of putting every dish away or putting every dish in. I mean that sometimes there is a dish that I do not immediately remember where it goes, or it is not obvious to me where it fits in the dishwasher, and I will consider the task fully complete while excluding that item from consideration.

One reason someone might develop this kind of behavior is “weaponized incompetence,” manipulation to avoid being assigned a type of work in the future.

Another reason could be “learned helplessness,” despair at an inability and the expectation that asking for advice will result in punishment rather than instruction.

These two mechanisms, especially working in unintentional harmony (e.g. a lack of enthusiasm and focus by a novice being interpreted as intentional sandbagging and punished), create a lot of deeply gendered household friction. I don’t mean to dismiss this as a common pattern. But for myself, these explanations have always felt like they were both misgendering me and contributing to my extremely late ADHD diagnosis.

When I decline to put away a stand mixer because I’m uncertain where it normally goes, I don’t have the experience either of wanting to push more dishwasher-unloading work onto my partner. In fact, this most often occurs when I have spontaneously decided to empty the dishwasher! And I don’t feel despair that I could never figure out where it goes or concern that I will be punished for misplacing it.

What I do feel is resistance to effort. When I am spontaneously emptying the dishwasher, I’m doing so because I have the expectation that it will be an easy task, and that I will reach a satisfying completion of the task without having to invest a lot of thought or effort into it.

When something breaks those expectations, what I experience is resistance to the idea of emptying the dishwasher in the first place. When there are gross dishes on the counter or worse, in the sink, with days-old mold covering them and old food that hasn’t been dumped out and utensils submerged in the liquid or fallen down the grimy garbage disposal, it is much less appealing to empty and refill the dishwasher.

But the easiest way to avoid this in general is for the dishwasher to be mostly empty and dirty, so that there is less reason for dishes to sit in the sink or on the counter to begin with, so that each step is a smaller task that my ADHD will say “just do it” to instead of saying “ew no” to. And in order to optimize for this state of affairs where emptying and refilling the dishwasher is easy, I need to maintain my perception that the action of emptying and refilling the dishwasher is easy. And one mechanism I have for doing that is to artificially cut off parts of the action that are more difficult.

This isn’t just a dishwasher situation. It comes up for laundry (clothes need to be separated? That’s resistance!), trash (trash cans are too full to consolidate their contents? Resistance!), cat litter, vacuuming, changing bed sheets, gardening, everything in the house.

So what I do is practice doing the easy version of the chore. Because doing the easy version of the chore is easy. And if I consistently do the easy version, the hard version isn’t needed as often. It still is—I can’t consistently machine wash costumes, the dishwasher filter needs to be cleaned regularly, etc.—but if it’s needed less often I can live in a cleaner baseline with lower effort. And what that means, and how that works, for my brain, is that sometimes I just don’t do parts that I don’t want to, because it helps me be more consistent about doing the parts I don’t mind.

I only really put this into words for the first time just now. So my apologies to all of my exes who never got a good explanation and just felt exasperated with me.