Hi friends,
I don’t know about you, but it’s been a long year right?
I told someone the other day that I feel like I’ve been holding my breath all year and something big is around the corner… and I’m not sure if it’s a good or a bad “big thing.”
Because the truth is, as caregivers, it feels like we’re often teetering on edges: the edge of having adequate support and not having it at all, the edge of being financially stable or not, maybe even the edge of our literal sanity sometimes.
And that uncertainty, where it feels like one block getting knocked over can bring the whole tower down, that’s exhausting.
At Caffeinated Caregivers, we’ve been having discussions with ourselves and our community, and researching whatever we can find on how we can manage this weight of looming uncertainty. Because it’s another thing on top of the caregiving and administrative tasks and household management and medical coordination, that wears us out and steals our mental and emotional energy as we keep the “what ifs” at bay.
So, what can you do? How do you keep from losing your mind when everything around you feels like it’s in constant flux?
If you’d asked me this five years ago, I would have given you a big shoulder shrug. But apparently smarter people have been studying this for awhile. And they don’t have an easy answer per se, but it is relatively simple: we have to increase our tolerance for uncertainty.
In other words, we have to learn to accept not knowing sometimes.
It’s not a terribly different concept from radical acceptance, the practice of allowing ourselves to acknowledge and sit with difficult and uncomfortable emotions, thoughts, and circumstances, instead of avoiding or numbing them.
And that’s where the difficulty comes in. Sure, just let me sit with the uncertainty of whether my child will have services at her school next year, whether my husband can keep his job after having to take so much time off, etc, etc. That definitely won’t eat at me and make me worry for days… *insert frustrated sigh here*
I told you it wasn’t an “easy” answer.
It requires mindfulness. It requires us to remain grounded in the present. It requires us to refocus our spiraling anxious thoughts. And we have to do this over and over again to build tolerance, not unlike the way someone might train for a marathon. And some days, I just don’t have the energy to do all that.
But here’s a little consolation: we often end up flexing these uncertainty-tolerance muscles whether we intend to or not.
When we’re stuck in survival mode, just making it through each day, we’re not focusing on the possibilities that could have months from now. When we’re in a busy time of life, shuttling our kids from appointment to appointment, we don’t have hours to spend wondering what their life will look like in adulthood. And slowly, we build our uncertainty tolerance bit by bit.
I feel confident with this assessment, because it seems to be the biggest difference between brand new caregivers and those who’ve been doing it for a decade. It’s not that the seasoned caregivers don’t care about certain things, it’s that they’ve learned to protect their energy by acknowledging the uncertainty and moving on anyway, instead of feeling like they’re drowning in it. (Again, easier said than done. I’m right there with you, friends.)
It’s not a comfortable process. It’s not even fair that we have to go through this process on top of everything else we have to deal with as caregivers.
But this uncertainty tolerance, or perhaps we can call it resilience, is one of the skills that can keep us afloat when we feel unmoored. It’s a skill that allows us to conserve our energy so we can focus on the things and people who matter. And it’s a skill that allows us to create a little more space for ourselves.
That doesn’t mean it’s easy. But then again, nothing worth doing ever seems to be that way.
We see you, friends. Until next time.
