The Care Cycle for Chronic Carers

AD: Blue cycle symbol on cream background with yellow text stating “The Care Cycle for Chronic Carers.” Each blue arrow has one of the following words: Awareness, Illuminations, Response, or Despair.

When everything around you is darkness, you can begin to think that’s all there is. 

A few days ago while picking Duchess up from the groomer, my mom and I were talking about the state of the world. 

Well...I was talking and my mom was listening. 

Okay so maybe I was giving a full Uta Hagen inspired monologue but I digress. 

It started with the amount of children in state foster care took a left turn into the bones of all those Indigenous children to the amount of bombings Palestinians have endured to how pens aren’t recyclable and ended with me repeating ad nauseum, “Nine fucking percent! That’s how much of what we recycle actually gets recycled. Only nine percent!” 

I’m great at dinner parties, I swear.

What my mother’s calm demeanor graciously offered was some much needed reflection. 

I care a lot...but when you shine a light on problems it can be easy to only see problems, pain, and tragedy. 

It’s what I call the chronic care cycle. 

You get so used to caring that you cannot focus any attention on solutions because you’re stuck building new awareness of new problems, illuminating them, hearing crickets as a response, and despairing that there’s nothing you can do about it. 

It’s a very common and normal occurrence if you care and that just means that you empathize deeply. 

The despair of caring can make you want to chuck that empathy into the trash. But one of the most beautiful things about empathy is the ability to make a person feel seen, held, tethered in a moment and anchored to the feeling of being enough. Okay. Alive. Safe.

It is dazzlingly and breathtakingly human. 

Like the lighthouse calls to lost ships, it’s the ability to say, “Here, you can come ashore. I will guide you. I can pull you out of the darkness.”

Empathy is that superpower to bear light amongst darkness. 

But that’s also its problem....you have to be in the darkness to bear that light.

But you’re reading this because you are a light bearer. Truth tellers have tongues of fire and eyes of lightning. We can’t help but bring darkness to light. It’s in our nature. But it’s a precarious position isn’t it?

When you become aware of a new injustice, you’re in the darkness. When you illuminate that injustice for others to learn, you’re in the darkness.

But even a lighthouse keeper has to rest during the day. The darkness isn’t something to be afraid of but it isn’t something we’re meant to stay in either. We’ve got to find a balance of light and dark. It’s why I say I’m a justice and joy coach. There must be both. 

The care cycle is a cycle because there’s no break after the response. There’s no crack for the light to come in. That’s what we all need when we care. We need perspective. We don’t need a cycle, we need an evolution. 

The past 18 months has been a masterclass in this cycle. We’ve been in a fog of despair. We’ve endured but we haven’t felt. We’ve held on to the promise that we were on the way “back” while denying the feeling of the truth -- there is no turning “back.” We are furiously tumbling through the darkness of the now without anchor or sail because everything has changed. 

But you’re reading this because you are a light bearer. Truth tellers have tongues of fire and eyes of lightning. We can’t help but bring darkness to light. It’s in our nature. But it’s a precarious position isn’t it? 

We wage our fire and our lightening, we rally, we build, we bear, we wail for change and truth but we are still in the darkness. We spend so much time illuminating other people and issues we forget we ourselves are luminous. We shine. We are light. But again, we forget ourselves.

So it’s easy for us to get undone by just how much darkness there is. There are countless examples we’ve witnessed just in 2021 alone.

We rally and we wage and we rage and we fight for a justice we will not see in our lifetimes. 

In all of that labor and in all of that love we forget ourselves. We sink into that darkness a bit more. We wonder if our voices even matter. We wonder if it’s even worth it to care. 

When you’re stuck in that cycle you need a moment like my mother offered me. You need some perspective. You need time to reflect. Because when you actually take time for yourself to think, to create boundaries, to tend to your needs, you’re able to build the strategy necessary to make the impact you want in your life. 

That perspective helps you to remember you’re not alone and you’re not helpless. You have so many solutions to offer the problems we face. 

Don’t forget that.