On reaching my wits end as a carer...
and what I'm learning about self-care in the process
You may have noticed I’ve been a bit quiet on here lately. My usual fortnightly posts haven’t been hitting your inbox or feed. Some of you on Substack have even reached out to ask how I am (thank you
- that meant alot to me).The fact is, about 2 months ago I hit a wall.
A combination of care demands and life events brought me to a place that can only be described as my wit’s end. I was mentally, physically and emotionally exhausted.
Unable to write – at least not anything I could post on here – I reached for my iPad and made a feeble attempt to convey my situation with a sketch. I used colour coding for the person, and differing thickness of arrows to convey the relative amount of support needed. No prizes for guessing that my illustrator daughter drew the very cute sketch of our sick dog!
This doesn’t even include my mother’s short emergency stay in hospital - the diagram was busy enough. Thankfully her stomach issues turned out not to be serious but the experience of being admitted to an English hospital in 2025 is far from stress free for carer or patient. She had the undignified experience of being made to wait in a bed in the corridor of Accident & Emergency for hours until space was freed up in an actual ward, followed by as many ward moves as she had hot dinners.
It’s been a bit nuts.
Pulled by these multiple, disparate demands on my mind, energy and heart, I reached a point where I was mentally exhausted, frayed and frazzled. I couldn’t make decisions, went from one need to the other. I felt thoroughly what the Brits call ‘discombobulated’.
Without being able to do the things that feed my mind and self esteem (writing, reading, freelance comms) added to the angst; I felt I was withering away on the inside. Frustration at the increasing disruptions to my weekly or daily plans were, as we say in this part of the world, ‘doing my head in’. There’s only so many times a person can mentally pick themselves up and start again without eventually feeling like giving up.
That was me.
I wanted out. To run away. To say no to everyone. To never cook a meal again. Sound familiar?
In a particularly wry moment, and in an attempt to add some humour to my situation, I wrote this tongue-in-cheek but honest response to the statement at the top of my shopping list on my fridge:
As you can see my usual positive mindset had gone out the window. I easily snapped at my family if they didn’t do the smallest things, swore at my sweet dog if he nagged me to play for the 100th time, and had zero tolerance for anyone who cut me up on the road or wore trousers that hung around their backside!
Rather worryingly, I didn’t recognise myself. I don’t think my family did either. I’m ordinarily someone who keeps going, keeps trying, keeps looking for the best in life. My dog certainly was keeping a wide berth from me when I made supper, crashing saucepans around in the kitchen as I gritted my teeth to prepare yet another meal.
Crying became frequent. If I bumped into a friend who asked me how I was with genuine concern, I would find tears leaking from my eyes.
Whilst this sounds a little like the menopause on stilts, I don’t see my hormones as being the main culprit, even if they may have augmented certain emotions.
The fact is, it wasn’t just the latest ‘perfect storm’ of care demands that brought me to this point. What my diagram doesn’t convey is the all important context: that this comes after more than 3 years of managing the process for my 57 year old brother to live independently of my mother (which I wrote about here). Thats three years of sourcing support for someone who doesn’t fit the system (he isn’t disabled but he is definitely vulnerable), of organising finances, finding and managing his PA, chasing social services, applying for benefits, and then sourcing care support and providing financial and emotional support for my mother.
To add an even deeper layer of context, this comes at the end of 21 years of raising children with a late diagnosis of autism, together with a late diagnosed autistic and ADHD husband (his diagnosis 5 years ago triggered the ones for our children). His issues with processing and sensory overload means he is regularly exhausted and finds planning or multi-tasking nigh on impossible - that said, he has recently discovered a new lease of life through lymphatic drainage massage from our physio (I’ll tell you more about that in another post but its been quite remarkable). Having a career that didn’t fit with this new reality, I found myself in a primarily nurturing and planning role, my former career travelling the world no longer fitting my reality.
With all this under my belt, it’s no wonder I had reached the end of my wits. I’m quite surprised it hadn’t happened before.
The Shift
What then, might you wonder, changed to enable me to think clearly enough to return to writing here? A mixture of things: some demands have lessened, I went away for a week, I sought good counsel and, most importantly, I am learning what true self-care looks like.
The demands that have lifted include the dog thankfully no longer waking us in the night to chew grass (although to be fair my husband was a rock and did that particular night duty); the cat, sadly deceased, no longer nags me for food/water/attention whenever I sit down try and work/write or relax. Most crucially, my daughter has just returned to her Uni town to spend time with her friends before they all disperse for the summer or for good. Whilst she’s still struggling with sleep, brain fog and anxiety, it’s important that she connects with them. It also gives me much needed headspace at home - to focus on my dear son who is in the middle of sitting his A levels under his own layer of post-glandularfever fog.
My break away was divine: I spent a week being fed, watered and tended to by my godparents who live in Dalkey, the beautiful Edwardian coastal village south of Dublin. Apart from being one of the pretties places in Dublin County, it’s where I spent most of my childhood summers. It’s a place where I feel at home. Every morning I swam in breath-taking waters (literally and metaphorically), soaked up the sun and switched off from almost all responsibilities. It was a dream.
But despite that oasis of a week off, within days of returning home I found myself struggling emotionally once again under the weight of the care demands. The sheer uncertainty of what lies ahead – for my mother and my daughter and therefore myself – the lack of paid work, and the feeling of not being in control over my own future returned like an irritating horde of flies hovering around my head.
Thankfully I have a clutch of wonderful friends and people who I can call on in situations like this. My husband is a great listener (even if he does sometimes have to duck to cope with the volley of frustration coming from me on bad days!) And I am truly fortunate to have a therapist who I have been seeing since starting to write my memoir and for whom I am so grateful to my mother for helping to pay for.
One of my friends, who is highly experienced and trained in pastoral care at my church, pointed out some crucial things that resonated. The most important piece of advice she gave me was that she felt I was close to burn out. She urged me to take it seriously before I became fully burnt out. Having experienced it herself, she knows what this is like.
Her words, together with those of my therapist, got me thinking about some key truths about self-care as well as the internal narrative we can form as carers, things I’m learning to re-frame and review. Both of these topics I want to explore in more detail in future posts as I learn to put them in place and reflect on how to make self care work better for me.
I want to hear from you, if you’re a carer, about how you do ‘self-care’. To hear your tips and tricks.
Specifically I want to look at how self-care is not just about boundaries or activities we sign up for, and more about attitudes - often unconscious ones we hold. And to look at how our internal narrative about our role as carers is key to well being.
I’ll be writing these over the summer, fitting this in around my caring roles and writing plans.
In the meantime, I’m off to eat some chocolate and read a novel seemingly written just for me: Sandwiched by Catherine Newman. I’ll let you know what it’s like
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Have a lovely weekend - it’s going to be a warm one here in the UK
That’s a heavy load Siobhan 😔 I don’t think I ever managed very much self care when I was in the thick of it, beyond going to bed early and doing the odd bit of writing or yoga. Even putting down a couple of sentences in my notes app would help. Someone older and wiser said to me that there are periods in life when all we can do is chop wood and carry water, and I think there is truth in that. But getting close to burnout is another thing and then I think it’s a case of having to ask hard questions like, are my efforts indispensable/irreplaceable in this given scenario, or could I outsource this aspect of a situation, and if so how. Love’s the engine of care as we all know, but saying no (when it’s possible to) is a form of self love too. If it’s not possible to do that I guess it’s back to enduring on until things change, which of course they do eventually
Good to hear from you, Siobhan. The burnout after all you’ve been through is completely understandable. Glad you got that week away, but can well imagine its benefits quickly dissipate. So tough to be the one holding things together. So glad you found the head space to write.