How I came back from the brink

I am writing this on a Monday. The weekend was hard and there are things I am embarrassed about, and I wish had gone differently, a decision I made on Sunday morning to stay home instead of going back and facing them. The work week has already handed me more than I wanted to carry. And underneath all of it, quieter and heavier than the rest, my mother is not quite herself anymore, and the family is having the conversations that families have when they cannot pretend otherwise.

I am not writing this from the other side of anything. I want to be honest about that. The brink is still close enough to see from here. But I am facing away from it, which is new, and that feels worth writing down before I talk myself out of it.

What I have come to understand is that there is no clean before and after. You don’t notice when mornings arrive where you wake up recovered, rebuilt, and sorted. The version of coming back that I used to imagine, where everything is resolved and the path forward is obvious, was always a fiction. The real version looks like this. Embarrassed but still here. Tired but making a plan anyway. Scared about things you cannot control, and doing the small controllable things regardless.

My mother is showing early signs of dementia. That sentence is hard to write and harder to sit with. She is still here, still her, but the edges are becoming uncertain in a way that the family can no longer quietly ignore. We are having the careful, painful conversations that nobody wants to be having. And I am doing all of this while also being a person in burnout, in a job that is taking more than it gives, trying to remember who I am outside of both of those things.

There is no tidy way to hold all of that so I have stopped looking for one.

Some seasons of life ask more of you than you feel equipped to give. The only answer is to give what you can, and be honest about the rest.

Coming back from the brink, I think, starts with stopping the pretence. Stopping the performance of coping when you are not coping and the absorption of everything that lands at your door without asking whether it is actually yours to carry. Stopping the slow erasure of yourself in the name of being useful to everyone around you.

It starts with a plan you write down on a Sunday night when you are wired and overwhelmed and finally too tired to keep avoiding the truth. It starts with one week at a time and not a grand transformation. It is best to just take one week at a time and it starts with acknowledging that your home needs attention, your body needs movement, your online presence needs rebuilding, your working life needs to change, and then doing one small thing in each direction rather than nothing because the list feels impossible.

It starts, if you are honest about it, the moment you decide that nearly imploding was close enough, and you would like to try something different now.

But I am on my way back. And for today, that was the only objective.

There will be a version of this entry that I come back to in thirty days, or sixty, or a hundred and fifty, and rewrite with more distance and more evidence. Events I cannot yet see will fill in the gap and things will get better in ways I cannot currently imagine, possibly harder in ways I am not yet prepared for. That is fine. This is a journal. It is allowed to be a draft.