"Caregiving often calls us to lean into love we didn't know was possible."
— Tia Walker
The coffee's still hot.
Nobody needs anything…
Yet.
You sit down at the table and your mind goes looking for something.
A thought.
A thread.
Something that belongs to just you.
But nothing comes.
The space where you used to be
You sit there with the coffee cooling slightly and you try to remember what you used to think about when you had a free ten minutes.
Before all of this.
There was something:
A book you were reading, a show you were into, some opinion you had about something that didn't matter to anyone but you.
You can't find it.
What you find instead is the residue.
The appointment that's still three weeks out but already living in your head.
The thing you need to ask the pharmacist.
The look on someone's face yesterday that you haven't finished thinking about.
Your mind goes to check on all of it, automatically… like the way your tongue goes to a sore inside your bottom lip from when you (accidently) bit it the other day during lunch.
And you realize you weren't actually trying to think about anything at all.
You were just checking if everything was still where you left it.
It is.
It's all still there.
None of it cleared.
The mind that never fully sets down
There's a version of tired that sleep helps.
And there's this other version, where you wake up and the same things are waiting for you, in the same order, like they never left because you never left them either.
You used to think the hard part of caregiving would be the tasks themselves.
The calls…
The forms…
The driving.
Don’t get me wrong, those things can be challenging.
But you didn't expect this part.
Even the quiet moments are already taken up.
Sitting still doesn't feel like rest because your attention is still out there, checking, tracking, holding the shape of everything you're responsible for remembering.
You don't even know what you'd think about if you had the room to think about something else.
You're not sure you'd recognize it.
Your coffee's gone cold now.
You should probably get up.
Something in the kitchen needs doing, or it will soon, or it did already and you forgot.
And that thought is already moving through you before you've finished having it.
It's such a familiar shape that you stop, slightly, to acknowledge it.
Saturday morning.
Just for a second.
Before it goes back to where it lives, which is everywhere, all the time, underneath everything else.
Weekly Resources
📚 Book Pick: Four Thousand Weeks — Oliver Burkeman: Talks about how little time we actually have and why trying to hold onto everything in your head only makes that time feel smaller.
💻 Blog Post: Why Caregiving Is So Stressful — The Meta Caregiver: A deeper look at why none of this ever really clears, and why it keeps building even when everything in front of you is getting handled.
Once you see it, it's hard to unsee it:
How much your mind is still holding onto…
Even in the quiet moments.
With you,
-Bryce
P.S. If you're in the middle of trying to hold all of this together and it's getting hard to see clearly, that's what I use Care Strategy Sessions for.
We take everything you're carrying and lay it out so you can see what actually needs your attention and what can wait.
You can book one here 👉🏾 HERE
Some of the resources I share may include affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you choose to purchase, at no additional cost to you. I only share resources I believe are genuinely useful.
