Now what? moving on when things change

Most often, I’ve written about grief as it relates to the death of a loved one. But grief isn’t only related to death and dying. In fact, it’s one of the most pervasive and universal experiences we share as human beings. It’s a part of the life cycle: relationships and jobs and the stages of childhood all come to an end. Life is full of changes that feel like losses and those losses have to be grieved.

As I’ve said before, I’m a real hit at cocktail parties when I tell people that I specialize in grief and loss. For most people, my work sounds deeply sad. And it can be! As I’m fond of saying, hard feelings are hard. But looked at another way—I live to reframe things, it’s the only part of CBT that I’m truly confident in—it’s a gift to honor our grief when something ends. We can experience our grief without wallowing; we can honor endings without big rituals. We can choose to acknowledge that endings are hard without staying stuck in the hard part.

So how do we do that? There are tons of sort of pop psychology buzz words people throw around, memes on social media meant to inspire, about “closure” and “closing the chapter” and “rising from the ashes.” Those are all lovely sentiments and I don’t disagree with them. But I think we lose the nuance of the grieving process when we put it into that kind of phraseology. Closure, for instance, isn’t a thing. Our lives are not actually laid out in neat chapters that resolve after X number of pages. We never leave behind the people we were, even if we make dramatic changes or dramatic changes happen to us. Instead, we add layers and learn lessons and yes, move forward. In short, like any kind of grief, the only way out is through.

Caregiver burnout is real. And it sucks.

Caregiving is a gift. The ability to take care of someone you love, at home, with relative comfort and routine, can be a beautiful and rewarding experience. It can also be a living nightmare. Most of the time it’s both, by turns.

Caregiver burnout doesn’t just appear one day, though it can feel like that: one day you’re fine and the next day you’re not. In truth, it’s not that dramatic; instead, it creeps in over time, slowly and steadily, until one day you find yourself overwhelmed, exhausted, frayed. It can be easy to miss or ignore the signs of burnout at first because caregiving is a full-time job. Additionally, you might also have a regular job and a family and friends and you know, a life. Or you did, before you became a caregiver. Slowly those other parts of you become buried underneath the weight of being someone’s sole care provider. It’s no surprise then that one day burnout hits you like a ton of bricks, in the form of exhaustion, irritability, anxiety, guilt, a miasma of shitty feelings.

You aren’t alone and it’s not unfixable. There are, in fact, both big and small steps to take when you discover that you’re burnt out. Before we explore those though, I would be remiss if I didn’t note that there are big systemic problems here that can make accessing those solutions tricky. For instance, one solution is to hire private help. However, for many people, hiring someone to help out is simply not a choice. There are programs through the county and state that will subsidize the cost but they’re means-tested, which means you have to come in under a certain income and asset level to access those programs. The result is, a lot of people fall into the middle ground of not rich enough for private care and not poor enough for state assistance.

That being said, there are still options. Maybe you can’t afford 24 hour care but you can swing a few hours here and there so you can take a break (an old client once called this Granny sitting, a phrase I find delightful). Maybe you can call on some nearly grown grandkids or other family members to take the occasional overnight or midday shift so you can rest. Maybe you’re resistant to that idea, and for good reason. But I would encourage you not to dismiss the idea of asking for others to step up out of hand. Sometimes someone becomes so stuck in their role as a caregiver, they don’t hear the other people in their lives who are offering to help. Or they decide not to ask for fear of hearing no. But if you don’t ask, you definitely do not receive.

Beyond that, there are other, smaller remedies. Who were you before this? What brought you joy? This is important because you cannot pour from an empty cup. In order to be someone’s caregiver, you have to be in good working order yourself. Meaning it isn’t selfish to take a shower or eat a hot meal or exercise. It’s actually a necessity that you do things for yourself so that you don’t become a shell of a person who resents what started as a gift: caring for someone you love.

There’s more to say here, namely about what happens when you’re caring for someone you don’t love or even like that much. But that’s another story for another day. Today, if you’re a caregiver, I want you to consider what things you do to keep yourself healthy and sane. If you can’t think of anything, it may be time to take a real break and take stock, and yes, consider therapy. Caregiving should be a gift, not a prison sentence.

"I'm lonely but I also want to be alone"

A common theme for my recently bereaved clients is an overwhelming ambivalence about being around others. They’re lonely but at the same time, they’re avoiding phone calls and visits from their well-meaning friends and family. They can’t bridge these two feelings of abject loneliness and also real resistance to being around other people; they’re stuck in ambivalence.

Ambivalence is uncomfortable. We’ve all been in that space and you just can’t stay there for long; it feels too bad. I have to borrow from the late, brilliant Stephen Sondheim here for an accurate description: “Sometimes I stand in the middle of the floor, not going left, not going right… am I losing my mind?” Ambivalence is like being paralyzed. How do you move out of it when you just feel stuck?

The answer, as usual, comes with more questions. Sometimes this conversation about being alone but being lonely but not being up for socializing but feeling isolated … leads to this: “which feels worse?” It can depend on the day! Sometimes answering the phone feels like climbing a mountain. Other days, the thought of spending another hour alone in a quiet house is the more daunting choice. Investigating our ambivalence is the ticket out of it. There is always a stronger pull in one direction or another if we allow ourselves to really sit with our feelings.

As with all parts of grieving, your mileage may vary. There will be days when being alone feels horrifying. On those days, use your energy reserve to reach out to someone. Likewise, there will be days when the mere thought of being with others feels exhausting. On those days, you have my permission to relish in your loneliness. Whichever choice you make, loneliness or connection, remember that it is just how you feel right now; it’s not permanent. You only have to get through the next day, the next hour, the next minute. The ambivalence of grief will ebb and flow, like all the other grief feelings. Give yourself the gift of waiting it out. Relief is coming; it may be beyond you right this second but any minute it will be within your grasp. Hang tight.

"The second year is harder" and other difficult truths about grief

I’ve written before about grief not having an end date. It’s a nebulous, unpredictable process. That’s because each of us experiences grief in different ways and on different timelines. That being said, we can expect certain periods to be universally hard during the bereavement process: the first birthday of your lost loved one, for instance, or the first holiday season. After a death (or a divorce or another kind of ending), there is a whole year of firsts to wade through. That first year can feel full of landmines—but also full of the comforts of reminiscing and tradition-keeping. There can be some sweetness in our loss, some celebrating of the birthday or the holiday, a heavy reliance on really marking the tough days. And there is a kind of relief in getting through that first long year.

Then the second year hits.

You would think the second year would be easier. And in some ways it is; time does heal, after all. But in other ways, the second year is a reminder of the finality of your loss. People prepare for that first year to be difficult but they aren’t necessarily prepared for the second year to hit so hard.

This sounds like bad news. But remember, your grieving process is not something to get over. Grief is a reminder of how deeply we loved someone; that love doesn’t just disappear. This holiday season, whether it’s your first or second or tenth with someone missing, don’t hide from your grief. Take some time to honor your losses—in big ways or small, whatever feels natural to you. And remember, you don’t have to do it alone.

Happiest holidays to you, even if they are a little tougher this year.

What if I want to know about my therapist?

Once, during a job interview, the interviewer asked to describe my boundaries with clients. A pretty vague question, right? Like, it depends! But seeing as how I was in an interview for a job I wanted (and eventually got, thank you very much), I played along and responded: I answer the questions my clients ask me (within reason).

Because here is the thing: when you are sitting across from me in that first session, I want to know some pretty deep stuff right off the bat. For instance, do you drink alcohol? Use drugs? Are you religious? Have you ever tried to hurt yourself or someone else? Not exactly cocktail party conversation. So if a client has a question for me (like how old am I or how many kids do I have, etc.), I’m more than willing to answer.

Some things about me are already clear: I wear a wedding ring, for instance. I’m fairly young. I’m a woman. I’m white. For some therapists, this is about as much information as clients are allowed to know. There are different schools of thought and none of them are wrong; in some ways, it’s a personal preference. There are good reasons for a therapist to not spend a lot of time talking about herself. For one thing, that’s not why you’re paying me; we’re here to talk about you, my friend. For another, some clients use this tactic to deflect and avoid the stuff they need to talk about. But I think, especially in the rapport building phase of therapy, it’s normal for a client to wonder, who is this person I’m telling all my secrets to?

So ask away! If I don’t want to answer, I won’t. Part of this process is developing a relationship and setting boundaries within it. I’m happy to tell you that I have two kids and a little dog and a husband. I’m happy to tell you that I’m in therapy myself, and that it helps me be a better therapist for you. I’m happy too, to talk about why you want to know about me instead of telling me about you. Like I said last time, almost nothing is off limits. This is a road we walk together. So tell me, what do you want to know?

You can say (almost) anything to your therapist

This week, in my series about what to expect from therapy, I want to dive into what may be off limits to talk about with your therapist. The short answer is, pretty much nothing!

There are exceptions to this of course: if your therapist thinks you’re going to hurt yourself or someone else, or that you already have harmed someone, they’re obligated to do something with that information. But otherwise, you get to say whatever you want. You don’t have to be on your best behavior when you’re talking to your therapist. Therapy is a relationship but it’s not a friendship or a conversation at a cocktail party; you don’t have to come armed with your best stories or convince anyone of how delightful you are. In fact, once some trust is established, you can be on your worst behavior if you so choose. In therapy, you get to explore the darkest and meanest parts of yourself. It’s safe there.

Still, it feels risky to open up to someone, even a professional. On the one hand, you’re seeking out therapy because you need to talk to someone and presumably, you’re ready to do just that: talk. On the other hand, there may be a fear that you’ll say something so dark, your therapist just won’t like you anymore. Generally, we want people to like us; we’re only human. So it can be difficult to drop the social niceties we’re practiced at performing. For instance, hearing “how are you?” from your therapist is different than hearing the same question from a co-worker. And yet, for many of us, the automatic answer is the one that comes out: “Fine, thanks, how are you?”

This isn’t to say you can’t be nice to your therapist. Believe me, we’re happy to be asked how we are, even if we won’t tell you the actual answer. I’m only saying that in that therapy session, you are released from surface-level social stuff. You can talk about whatever you want.

Which brings me to another caveat: you can also NOT talk about whatever you want. You don’t have to recount every dark thought that has ever entered your mind. You don’t have to review every embarrassing moment or delve into something that feels too tricky to explore. In that session, you get to decide where to begin and where to stop. When your therapist asks how you’re doing, you can tell the truth. And if the conversation starts to go somewhere you aren’t ready to go, you can say no. You don’t have to worry; you can say (almost) anything to your therapist.

When your body betrays you

Last week, I wrote about grief. I was mostly referring to the grief we experience when someone we love dies. But there are losses throughout our life cycle that don’t necessarily have to do with death.

For the majority of my career, I’ve worked with people experiencing life-changing and often chronic illness. The prognosis doesn’t have to be terminal for the symptoms of being ill—of having a body that doesn’t do what it used to do—to be devastating and isolating. Your friends and family can’t understand what you are experiencing. It’s difficult to explain pain or fatigue or some other unquantifiable symptom to someone whose body is not sick. In a misguided attempt to help, these family members and friends may tell you that your situation isn’t as bad as it could be; that you just have to push yourself harder; that you need a second, third, fourth opinion.

Their hearts are in the right place. They’re hoping that the power of positive thinking will do the trick and cure you. But not everyone is helped by the relentless positive thinking memes that social media throws at us: believe you’ll get better and you will! Trust your body! Mind over matter! Et ceterra, et ceterra, until you start to doubt your own feelings. Among these feelings, of course, is the grief of what you have lost.

Because although you are still here, your body has betrayed you. Illness takes from us. Maybe you aren’t able to exercise anymore, or even get on the floor with your kids or grandkids. Maybe you can’t drive anymore. Or your brain fog is making it hard to concentrate at work or school or in social situations. Those are big losses to bear by yourself.

Therapy is not going to cure your illness. Further, your therapist will not be able to tell you how long you’ll be sick or if any of what you’ve lost will be returned to you. Your therapist can’t tell you that everything is going to be ok. What therapy can do is meet you where you are. You can grieve. Then you can start to rethink and rebuild your life. Then grieve some more and then rebuild some more… You can be hopeless and hopeful both at once. And you do not have to walk this path alone.

Stuck in grief

Grief never ends.

I don’t mean that grieving is a hopeless, forever state of being, though it can certainly feel that way. I only mean that there is no magic solution to fix it. There is no timeline to follow; there is no guidebook. You can experience your grief in any way that feels natural to you. The only caveat is, you cannot fast forward or go under or over or around it. You have to experience the hard feelings of grief and loss.

Hard feelings are… hard! And so many people enter therapy hoping for answers, to solve the issue they are presenting: I have a feeling, it is hard to have it, please can we make it go away? But grief doesn’t go away. It continues even when we think we have “solved” it. The task is to learn how to live with it instead of trying to outrun it.

And you can live with it, even when it feels suffocating. Over time, grief softens. It feels less like a dark hole you can’t climb out of and more like a shadow: always with you but less obtrusively. You can be released from the idea that you have to solve your grief, or outgrow it, or close the door on it. You don’t have to do that to be helped.

Then what can help? Most importantly is to acknowledge our losses: ritualize and memorialize and speak the names of the people we have lost aloud. And then, in our acknowledgement, we can also reach out to others. We can ask for help—from our friends, our family, our religious faith. We can go to therapy and allow someone else to carry the burden of grief for just a little while. We do not have to experience any of our feelings alone, even if they feel isolating. Grief is a universal experience. It never ends and it can’t be solved. But it can be shared. And sometimes, just sharing our burdens can go a great way towards relief.

Where do we start?

How does therapy… start?

Some people come to therapy fully ready to spill: they’re like a pot of water ready to boil over. Those first two or three sessions are just full of words and feelings and sometimes tears. That’s been my personal therapy experience and it’s one I really understand: talk until you can’t talk anymore and then we can figure out where to go next.

But not everyone is like me (thank God). Some people enter therapy reluctantly or cautiously; they are not in fact ready to spill their guts to a stranger. It’s not that they don’t know why they came, it’s more that they don’t know how or where to begin. Or they start and then get stuck. Or—and this one is the toughest for me as a clinician—they want an immediate answer.

There’s good news and there’s bad news, here. The bad news is, I do not possess a magic wand. I can’t make sisters or lovers or children behave better; I can’t bring back a loved one from the dead; I can’t give you a secret code that will make your anxiety disappear into thin air. But—and here’s the good news I promised!—there are going to be answers. We can find them together, by sifting through the past and the present. We can find a way to set boundaries with the misbehaving family members; memorialize the dead loved one; understand and quell the anxious thoughts that plague you. In short, we can start wherever you are that particular day, that particular moment, and see where we end up. We just have to start.

There are no emergencies

URGENT! SOCIAL WORK NEEDED ASAP.

That’s the email subject line I received a few weeks ago, on a Monday morning, of course. My body reacted before I even fully digested the words: I could actually feel my blood pressure rising. I believe I even said NO, out loud, to my phone.

This is not the first time I have seen this subject line, of course. In my eleven years of social working, some version of it has been deployed for any number of reasons: someone wants to send their loved one to rehab against their will (not a thing); someone’s stairs are falling down inside their home and they think the city should fix it (maybe a thing but good luck); a family has deep, ongoing, intergenerational trauma that can only be fixed with literal years of internal family systems therapy but actually one of them is dying and so everything needs to be fixed within the next three to five days (this happens monthly in hospice; when will we learn??). Use your imagination to think of the most complicated and devastating stories and then imagine someone (a doctor, a nurse, a dietitian) saying, “oh, the social worker will fix it.”

Let me change your expectations: the social worker can’t “fix” anything.

I don’t mean to sound flippant here. I guess I should be flattered that there are people who think that someone with an MSW will possess the mysterious magic answer that has eluded everyone else. And if I’m being honest, that’s partly why I chose this profession: I wanted to help people. I wanted to make people’s lives better. But the thing about this work is that there are no magic answers. And there are no emergencies. There are huge, frustrating, systemic barriers to helping real people in real time but no amount of “urgent/emergency/ASAP” email subject lines can fix those.

Which is not to say social workers can’t be helpful! We can be; we are. But I have found that maybe 20% of my job is explaining how why I can’t help. I hate those moments when they happen with patients; I hate them even more when they happen with my co-workers. It’s my own ego that gets in the way here: I don’t want my non-social work partners to think I’m bad at my job, or worse, lazy. I don’t want them to stop asking for my opinion, for my expertise, for my help. But I also cannot lie. Some problems are not fixable. And—I will be saying this with my dying breath--there are no social work emergencies.

When I got that email, I had my mini temper tantrum and then I took a deep breath and called my supervisor. We came up with a plan, which I shared with the family in need. And then I don’t know what happened. Because that is the other piece: all of these issues—the rehab placements and falling down stairs and troubling family dynamics—eventually they get solved. We don’t always get to hear the end but there is an end, every. Single. Time. It bears remembering that we are just part of the process, not the process itself. There are, as always, no secret answers except to keep moving and helping and breathing; there’s no rush.

In defense of the six minute visit

This is in defense of the six minute visit.

There is a kind of cold call aspect to my job that has taken years for me to accept with grace and poise. When I explain to patients and families that I’m calling to offer emotional support, some people are immediately hesitant. I’m sure this is partly because of the way we view mental health in this country but that’s not the point of this particular post; suffice it to say, people are on guard when I explain why a hospice social worker is offering them a visit. The nurse, the home health aide, even the chaplain: their roles are very clear to patients and their families. But when I say that I just want to talk, that makes some people feel weird.

So over the years, I’ve become practiced in how to get people to talk to me, a stranger. (And, since the pandemic, a stranger wearing a mask, which really hinders the non-verbal cues. But again, I digress).  When I see a new patient, which I do once or twice a week, I have a kind of game plan: I start with an informal list of questions that I offer to my patients and their families. They range from the mundane (where are you from originally?) to the thorny (what are you afraid of?). Sometimes those questions lead to a lovely, rapport building visit and I feel I’ve done something useful. Other times though, I’m not welcomed to stay. I don’t mean I’m unceremoniously kicked out; it’s more that it becomes clear to me that the patient or the family do not want to talk to me. I am, after all, a stranger, if a well-meaning one.

At a recent visit, this exact thing happened: there were introductions, I explained the purpose of my visit, and the patient’s adult children very kindly thanked me for coming and then said they were fine and I should feel free to hit the road. So, after only six minutes of standing in the living room, I left. The patient was hours from death; the family was all present and all on board with hospice philosophy. They had funeral plans, they were following the medication regiment, they were making jokes about death (a very solid coping mechanism). They really and truly did not need social work intervention.

And yet! My critical inner monologue kicked in as soon as I began the walk back to my car: six minutes! That wasn’t long enough! I did something wrong. Maybe a better social worker would have pressed. Perhaps a better social worker would have explained in greater detail what the visit was for. Was I distracted? Burnt out? Having an off day? I could have asked to stay, I could have insisted on seeing the patient with my own eyes, I could have… completely alienated a lovely family who made their needs known to me the moment I walked in the door.

Because that is the thing about this job: you have to have an innate ability to both read the room and find the places to push. Sometimes there are no places to push. There are no weak spots or cracked open doors to lean against. Sometimes I have to trust my instincts that I am an unwanted guest and get out before I start to cause harm. That family did not need me. Six minutes was plenty of time for them; why shouldn’t it be plenty of time for me too?

May her memory be a blessing

There have been a lot of deaths recently. Maybe that sounds strange. Of course I’ve had a lot of patients die; I work in hospice, after all. But, as any medical type person can tell you, sometimes deaths come in clumps. When there are so many so close together it feels like whiplash. Because in the meantime, as patients are dying, I’m getting new referrals every day. I feel like some kind of hospice robot: “Hi, I’m Elizabeth, I’m a social worker from hospice, I’m just calling to introduce myself…” The weight of all this loss does pull me down sometimes but more so, I’m afraid I will lose some sense of importance in my work. That I will become numb to the endless death as a way of protecting myself but as a result, I will also lose some empathy.

But yesterday I lost one of my favorite patients. At the beginning of my practice, I would have been too afraid to name her that way; I thought you couldn’t have favorites. But my very wise hospice preceptor told me at the beginning of my hospice career that “one out of every hundred can really get to you; more than that, you’ve got a problem. But you’re allowed one in a hundred.” I keep those words close to my heart for days like this. The patient I lost over the weekend was one of those hundred, the first one in a long time, in fact. Her death really hit me.

That’s hard to say, honestly. It’s hard to explicitly acknowledge my grief when I lose a particularly dear patient. I suppose it’s because I’m afraid that I’m too close or burnt out or not doing it right. It doesn’t happen with every patient, of course; that would lead to burnout. But when it does happen, when I lose a patient I particularly liked or even loved, what should I do? How can I memorialize a loss that isn’t really mine? The waves of death have numbed me a little of the years but then this lovely lady died and it knocked me over a little. It reminded that I’m not actually a robot. I am, it turns out, just a person—a person who sometimes misses patients who have died. I know they are remembered by the people who loved them but I want to remember them too. I want to acknowledge the loss of someone special to me, even if it isn’t really my loss to bear. It is allowed. It is part of what makes this work so sacred and beautiful.

So here’s to her—and to the few before her, those other “ones in hundreds” that float up in my memory today; may their memory be a blessing.

Too much and also not enough

Today’s theme is: nothing would be enough.

Something I’ve learned about the physical process of dying is that it can take a long time. And during that in between time, when someone is slowly slipping away, there isn’t a whole lot to do. Family members ask me all the time what they should be doing, besides medicating and sitting and doing the personal care that a living/dying body still requires. And all I can tell them is, what you are doing is enough. There is no secret other task to complete; you’re already doing everything you can. Lately I’ve learned to add, it doesn’t feel like enough, but nothing would. Nothing would be enough.

Extrapolate that thought to the situation we all find ourselves in: the seemingly endless marathon of work and childcare and eldercare and anxiety and boredom and news and sickness and and and. Nothing we are doing feels like it is Enough: there are not enough hours in the day, not enough mental space to hold all the events of the world, not enough self care, not enough socialization, not enough of anything. And yet, what could be enough at this moment? What would be enough, except to return to our normal lives?

So much of my work is giving permission to others to let go. I have leaned over the bed of a dying body and whispered that it’s time to go. I have sat in intimate silence with near strangers and assured them that it is not cruel, but loving, to want their loved one to die instead of live in suffering. I have encouraged both the dying and then the bereaved that what they are doing is enough, even though it doesn’t feel that way. I have said it in supervision, to social workers who feel they should be smarter, more skilled, better advocates. I have meant these words every single time. But I find myself forgetting to apply them to myself.

I could make you a list of all the times over the past ten months—the past ten years, really, of my career!—that I have felt I did not do enough. I think any social worker could list for you the mistakes they’ve made over a long career: resources they did not know about, clients they could not reach, tasks they forgot to complete. But I would also argue that what has gone undone is far, far less than what has been done: referrals made, clients heard and supported, minds changed. Even when we feel that there is not enough—not enough resources, not enough time, not enough of us—we continue to do the work.

And so I give you permission—who am I kidding, I give myself permission—to let go of doing more. There is no more; there is what we are doing and it is enough.

Burning out, taking care

I don’t want to write about burnout.

I don’t want to write about self care.

I don’t want to reiterate and review what we all understand, not only as social workers but as parents trying to maintain some normalcy for our children; as professionals attempting to be effective and innovative with new work challenges; as adults navigating how to safely socialize with our loved ones. I don’t want to acknowledge that I have hit a wall because we are six months into a global pandemic and in the midst a political horror show and I have two little kids and three jobs and it’s honestly just too much.

The thing is, it’s not hard to write about burnout and self care: they have become meme-ified and pop cultured to death. There are articles and BuzzFeed lists and Tik Toks (I would imagine; I’m too old for Tik Tok) that explore these topics. But because the internet eventually blunts the edges of nuance from anything, these concepts feel more like buzz words than complicated and fraught issues. But there is nuance to be found. There are levels of burnout; there are different forms it takes, different ways it manifests, not just in our professional lives but in our personal lives. There are ways to talk about self care, too, that are complicated, that force us to consider the complicated nature of society and privilege, that go beyond “make sure you’re getting your 8 hours of sleep a night!” There may be nothing new, exactly, for me to say about burnout and self care, but here I am. Again.

I am tired. I am tired of a pandemic that has robbed me of the most basic joys of my life: overscheduling our weekends with out of town visits and parties and tertiary friends. I am tired of a political discourse that is disappointing at best and disgusting at worst. I am tired of a scary and unknown future that awaits us with climate change and racial violence and injustice. I am tired of the news, every day, of people in power doing the objectively wrong thing. I am tired of checking off the box on my psychosocial assessment that says I provided education about self care to the patient and their family. Did I do that? Did the words ring hollow? They ring hollow in my own mind so I imagine they aren’t coming across full of vitality and assuredness.

I am sleeping; I am eating; I am exercising (kind of; running up the stairs twenty times a day counts, right?). I am doing the self care things but I am still in the burnout place. That’s why I keep returning to these concepts. It is not as easy as saying “treat yourself” and getting a pumpkin coffee. Self care is complicated and difficult because the majority of us cannot just turn off. In fact, I know I’m luckier than most. I can’t write about self care and burnout without also acknowledging my great privilege. When I am exhausted, I have a partner who can pick up the home and kid slack. Although I am enraged by the lack of justice for my Black brothers and sisters who have been murdered by police, my whiteness allows me to be only angry, not traumatized. When I have reached my limit at work, I can schedule an easy day or call out sick. But I am still struggling.True self care does not feel possible in this environment. I keep thinking to myself, there is a way to be restored. But what is it? How do I find it?

This is the part where I should review the signs of burnout and tell you some of my favorite self care tips. But I don’t think that’s what we’ll do today. Instead, I want to thank you for reading; I feel better after the words are out of my head and released into the world. And I want to say, too, that I think it’s ok to hit the wall once in awhile. Sometimes doing the best you can is to let go of the best and just, you know, do.

Be well this week; I’m certainly trying to be and I hope you are as well.