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Show Notes: Episode 79 "How Not to Hate Caregiving"
You might have woken up today and thought how crappy it is to have to be a caregiver. It could be a difficult week, month, or year for you. I know how it feels. I get having the feeling that caregiving is suffocating you. If you feel like you can’t breathe, like you can’t do this anymore, that caregiving has ruined your life or that you’re getting really close to feeling that way…then maybe we should talk about trying to approach things a little differently.
Let’s talk about how not to hate caregiving.
Now I’m not an overly positive person. I have met people who have survived cancer and they are full of gratitude for just being able to wake up each day. You’ve met them… the people that when you want to talk about how much life sucks you know they’ll respond with everything you should be happy about right now. There’s nothing wrong with seeing the world this way… I’m just not that person. If you are, I’d love for you to send me an email and let me know what keeps you going with that mindset. In fact, if any of you want to send me an email I’d love to hear from you. If you’re signed up for the newsletter all you have to do is hit reply and I’ll get it.
Now even though I’m not a rose-colored glasses type of person I do try to find the good out of a situation and I work hard at holding on to the ability to enjoy my life as much as possible. That isn’t a gift for me it’s a skill that I am continually refining. I have to work at this because oftentimes the best things to do in life are the hardest. I’m sarcastic by nature. I’m quick to respond especially in difficult situations. I’m always reading between the lines and I’m quick to create boundaries.
So when I say that caregiving can fuel you. When I tell you that it is possible to feel good inside when you’re a caregiver I am not telling you that because I feel that being a caregiver is easy. I am telling you because caregiving is easily one of the hardest things I will have to do long-term and I refuse to hate my life while I do it. I believe you can do the same.
It isn’t easy to figure out how to enjoy life when you first become a caregiver. I didn’t gleefully jump into being a spousal caregiver when my husband was diagnosed with cancer. My beginning experiences with caregiving were horrible. I quickly started to experience caregiver burnout and I was oftentimes miserable but there were some moments of clarity. If you listened to last week’s episode you know I learned a valuable lesson in the hospital with my husband and I went through that first year having many little aha moments but I was just too exhausted to put them all together to see the big picture.
A lot of us find ourselves struggling in the beginning. We work hard to get a handle on things and right when we think we know what we’re doing something changes and we have to start all over again. It’s very easy to not even notice how life feels, in general, when you are in this first phase because you don’t have a chance to take a moment to step back. But when you do have that quiet moment it can really bring you down. Do you remember when you had just enough quiet time that something inside you made you look back on the past year or years of caregiving and you realized that you haven’t been happy in a while? Or maybe right now is that moment. Then you just didn’t have the energy to know what to do with that information and you went back to the way things have been. You continued to be unhappy but it was worse because you now knew you were unhappy. Before you didn’t realize it and it...
