Short answer: Your week got smaller and that is real. What makes it hurt is not the size of it, it is what you keep setting it beside. Every time you measure this week against your old life or somebody else’s, the good parts of it get erased before you can register them. Stop the measuring first. Then look at what is actually in the week.
It is Sunday night and she is finally asleep. You are on the couch with the phone, and there is your college roommate in Lisbon, and your cousin’s new kitchen, and somebody’s kid in a cap and gown. You put the phone face down on your chest and the house is quiet except for the ice maker. The biggest thing that happened to you this week is that the new aide showed up on time on Thursday.
What do I do when caregiving has taken over my life?
Seneca was one of the richest men in Rome and he wrote constantly about not needing much, which has annoyed people for two thousand years. He was right about this part anyway.
“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.”
Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, Letter 2
Why this hits differently when you are a caregiver
The usual advice here is to find joy in the little things. Keep a gratitude list. Notice the sunlight.
To you that sounds like being handed a plate with almost nothing on it and being told to say thank you.
So look at what Seneca actually said. He did not say a small life is a good life. He said poor is not a measurement of what you have. It is a measurement of the gap between what you have and what you are holding it up against.
You are running three comparisons at once, most hours of most days.
There is the life your friends are having, which arrives on your phone in pictures, edited. There is the life you used to have, which was not that great either but you did have Saturdays. And there is the life you would be having if she were well, which is the cruelest one, because wanting it can feel like wanting her gone.
None of those three are wrong to want. Wanting your own life back is not a character flaw and it does not mean you love her less. It means you are a person.
But notice what the comparing costs and what it buys. It runs constantly, it taxes every hour, and it does not change a single thing about the week. It only makes what is in the week unreadable.
Because here is the thing about your good moments now. They are small by nature. The aide came on time. She ate the whole bowl of soup. She laughed at the dog. Held up against Lisbon, that is nothing, and your mind will tell you so instantly.
Held up against yesterday, it was the day.
The size of a thing is not in the thing. It is in what you put next to it.
One thing you can do today
Ask what you are measuring against.
Carry one question with you today, and only that one. When the flat feeling shows up, the one that arrives about four in the afternoon and again on the couch at night, stop and ask yourself: against what?
Then answer in three or four words. Not a paragraph. “Against Lisbon.” “Against 2019.” “Against what Saturdays used to be.” “Against my brother’s life.”
Open a note in your phone and give it one word for a title. Add each answer as it comes. That is the whole practice. You are not fixing anything and you are not arguing with any of it.
Before bed, read the list once.
Most people find two or three things on it, not twenty, and the same two or three all day long. That is worth knowing. It means the weight on you is not your whole life. It is a short list of ghosts on repeat.
When it gets hard: you will want to argue with the entries, or feel bad about them, especially the one about her being well. Do not do anything with them. Write the words, close the phone. Naming a thing is not the same as agreeing to it, and it is not the same as complaining about it.
Do this for three days. Then look at the list and notice which one runs the most. That one is worth your attention. The rest are noise you have been paying for.
Sit with this
What would this week look like if you had nothing to hold it up against?
Going deeper with this lesson
This article gives you one of the four practices in the lesson. The book adds the other three, plus the full reflection on Seneca, a journaling prompt, and a worksheet page. Volume 3 runs from Lesson 41 through Lesson 60 and deals with meaning, legacy, and lasting the long haul, which is the part nobody prepares you for.
