When You Are the Only One Holding the Thread

There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes when you are the only one still holding the thread.

When you are the person who answers the calls.
Who sits at the bedside.
Who carries the stories.
Who holds the worry when no one else is looking.

This is the quiet weight of being the anchor.

For me, this has been my grandmother.
Being the only family still present.
The one who witnesses the fading, the confusion, the tenderness, and the grief that arrives before the goodbye.

Some days it feels like love.
Some days it feels like exhaustion.
Often, it is both at once.

I have long known the name for this: compassion fatigue.
But I have never felt it in my body as deeply as I do now.

It is not a lack of love.
It is the weight of caring deeply for too long, without enough space to restore yourself.
A quiet erosion that happens even when the heart is willing.

When the nervous system is always on, always listening, always bracing, it begins to ache.

What has helped me is not trying to be stronger, but learning to be softer with myself.

To pause.
To breathe.
To let myself rest without guilt.

I have learned to tend my own heart in small ways.

Slow walks.
Warm tea.
Gentle movement.
Time in the garden.
Quiet moments where I allow myself to feel without needing to fix anything.
Visit to the Wreck room to smash some frustration.

Some days I light a candle and simply say, this is hard.
And that is enough.

I have walked this path before.
But this time, the grief runs alongside the care.
So I am learning not how to give more, but how to remain with myself as I give.

From one Bean Feasa to another Wise Woman
Many Blessings
Tash xo