Hi,
I want to be honest with you about where I am right now.
I've been doing too much. Not in a productive, busy way — in the way where you wake up and the list of things demanding your attention is already longer than the day.
My parents are 89 and 90. Both have dementia. I've been travelling back to the UK regularly to check on them, help with care, make sure they're okay. That alone is enough to carry.
But alongside that, back home in Turkey, I've been tracking a problem with a newly installed garden watering system — leaks, waste, water going where it shouldn't. It's not my job. I know it's not my job. And yet I've been compiling data, documenting the issue, trying to get someone to listen.
And through all of this — the care, the travel, the work, the watering system that isn't my responsibility — I've been trying to make myself understood in a different language, in a different culture, to people who may not even notice what I'm doing or why.
I've been thinking a lot lately about what it costs to care when nobody seems to notice that you do.
That's the thing nobody tells you about taking on too much: it's rarely about not knowing your limits. It's about caring too much to stop. About feeling like if you don't do it, it won't get done. About carrying things that were never really yours to carry — and not knowing how to put them down without feeling like you've failed someone.
I don't have a neat answer to this. I'm in it.
But I've started asking myself one question when I notice I'm doing something that isn't mine to do:
'If I let this go, what actually happens?'
Not what I fear will happen. What will actually happen.
Most of the time the honest answer is: someone else handles it, or it doesn't matter as much as I thought, or it resolves itself. The catastrophe I was preventing wasn't as certain as it felt.
I'm sharing this because some of your replies over the past few weeks have sounded like this too — carrying more than your share, giving more than you're getting back, not sure how to stop without feeling like you've let someone down.
If that's you right now — you're not alone in it.
More next week.
Karl
