How to keep going
You've got this! But do you want to?
Adrienne and I have been talking about how we can provide more acknowledgement and encouragement to the community. We want The Caregiver Space to be a safe space for all emotions. We also aim to help people move from feeling overwhelmed and alone to feeling capable and connected.
People come to a safe space knowing they can open up about things they’re not proud of. We want to encourage people to share their small victories, too. We’ve been playing around with different ideas.
I really like Gemma Correll’s stickers for doing hard stuff. I once made a bunch of similar stickers for a scouts-themed party. It was a lot of fun to reward each other, even if, and maybe because of, how silly it was. We’ve been debating if a similar idea would work on Facebook.
I took this photo early enough in the night that we aren’t yet all covered in stickers.
Adrienne is a graphic designer, so it should be simple for us to create badges.
The tricky part is figuring out things to say that feel encouraging and not patronizing.
A friend texted me “You got this!” and instead of feeling encouraged, I felt like I was being dismissed. Like it was the polite way to change the topic.
I posted about it in the young caregivers group and we had a conversation about it that helped me sort out why I felt the way I did.
The type of things that are encouraging when you there’s an end in sight are not necessarily helpful when you’re in a situation that’s indefinite.
Hearing “you’ve got this!” is a reminder that the end is just around the corner, that you can totally make a deadline, that you can keep going just a little bit longer.
It can also be encouraging for clearly defined behavioral goals, like keeping your streak of meditating every day, eating an extra serving of vegetables, or getting out for a walk.
It feels different when you’re telling someone how overwhelmed you feel and they say “you’ve got this!”
Well, yeah. You’ve got this. But should you be expected to do all of this? How much longer can you continue to manage it all?
That’s when we don’t need encouragement to keep going.
We need help figuring out how to be able to stop.
It clicked for me as I read a letter from a friend.
She wrote “when I train for endurance bike racing, the general idea behind increasing strength is to push so hard you break your muscles down, which is exhausting and sometimes painful, but then you give them rest so they come back stronger, then repeat!”
Endurance isn’t about denying your needs, it's about understanding and respecting them. It’s about knowing when to rest. It's about letting yourself become stronger instead of just breaking down.
Photo by Tommy Tuite.
Is the pain you feel the good kind? Are you pushing yourself out of your comfort zone and building your resilience? Are you growing stronger?
Have you pushed past exhaustion and into burnout? Are you denying your needs? Are you listening to the people who encourage you to do it all so they don’t have to?
Stopping isn’t easy.
You’re not always training for a race.
Life isn’t a race. There are no trial runs. You rarely have an opportunity to prepare yourself for the things that shake up your life — and dump responsibilities onto you.
But the rules of your body apply, be it cycling or care work. It doesn’t matter who’s encouraging you on the sidelines. You can’t just keep giving it your all.
Photo by Jac Mautner of Untitled Cycles.
If you feel like you need permission to stop, this is it.
Stopping — or at least slowing down — doesn’t mean giving up.
Getting someone else to take over isn’t shirking your duties. It doesn’t mean the work isn’t important or you don’t care about the person who needs support.
It means there are limits to what any one person can do and you’re learning to respect that.
Stopping is part of how you can keep going.
So, yeah, you’ve got this.
But maybe you shouldn’t have to. You deserve rest. You deserve support. You deserve the opportunity to take care of yourself.
The thing is, the friend who texted me the “you’ve got this!” this is a kind, considerate person. Sometimes I expect more from her because of how supportive she’s always been.
She was trying to politely change the topic, because it turned out she was in the middle of something while we were texting.
She called me later when she had time to talk.
If you’re less of a curmudgeon than I am, Instagram is full of accounts with delightful illustrations of inspirational messages, like @littearthlings, @artsyaffirmations, @shopsundae, @thehopedynamic, and @quotesbychristie.
How about a sticker that says "I made it through today!"