It goes without saying

I have strange likings for words. They come from nowhere and surprise me. I hear myself say… I have always liked this word or that word. A word I liked yesterday, archipelago. I still like it today.

The last couple of weeks have been tricky. Except when I say tricky I don’t mean tricky. I mean more than tricky. The kind of weeks when you wish for a new one to start but wishing doesn’t make it happen and when it does it is just the same as the last one.

This leads me to a conundrum, one that we are all familiar with. The one where you want to be honest and tell it how it is but don’t want to deal with the, Oh I’m sorry ,or the, poor you, or the, you are amazing or the if you just do this, response. You are looking for neither pity nor praise but I think you are just looking to say this is my life. Weird, hard at times, out of the ordinary, relentless, tiring, scary, pressurised, difficult. Most lives are all of these things at times but while no one on wants to play a top trumps of misery, carers lives may contain more of these things more of the time.

I don’t want to moan, I don’t want to be, Oh poor old me but I don’t want to be artificial, I don’t want to paint my world in rosy hues when recently, like the weather, it has been grey. Not just grey but grey with flashes of lightning and rolls of thunder.

I feel that if I fake it, I just make it more difficult for other carers who may be struggling to say what they feel and that is not my intention. Nor do I want to say nothing and stay silent behind closed doors.

It is hard in these patches(!) to do anything but especially hard to drag yourself out of it. You may know what keeps you healthy. Yoga, writing, dancing, walking, reading and gardening work for me but I haven’t done any of them for weeks. I admit having a herniated disc hasn’t helped but it is my mind I am worrying about as much as my body. As my pain worsened my mood blackened. Lost in a world of sugar cravings, Netflix binges and scrolling. Or just lost.

But the pain has lessened and today I am taking little steps back. I met with my lovely group of creative carers this morning and we talked poetry, drew and wrote. We admired the work of Jennifer Wong and Ocean Vuong and escaped to a different time and a different place. We know what our lives are like but we know without talking about it. Sometimes you just don’t need words.

As I write this, the sun is coming through the blossom on the cherry tree and there are small patches of blue sky. They are really, really small and sometimes almost totally concealed behind grey clouds but they are there.

So I start one more time to put myself back together again, to ignore the persistent voice that tries to draw me to the dark side, to pick up the pieces, to rebuild rather than knock down.

If you would like to join a group of carers who write please do get in touch, we meet online and have a couple of spaces available. We talk about everything apart from care not because we don’t care but because it goes without saying.