End of the day

Ends of the day are my most difficult times during a day as I had alluded in my last post.

End of the day is when all the busy abruptly stops. Your mind in motion with things you have to do at work is suddenly halted and that's generally when one can start to decompress. Usually, my decompression would happen in my car during the drive home when I was still driving to work. 

Mindless music, an audio book, or just taking in the scenery; all a needed intrusion into what is an otherwise overthinking/hyperactive mind.

When COVID hit and I started working from home permanently, that decompression time was kind of lost. I no longer had that drive time; that half hour to myself, with no phones, no emails, no gotta do this, gotta do that. When COVID hit, that decompression time became where I would go chat with hubs for a few and we would rehash our day before moving onto  things needing to be done or things we wanted to do after the work day had ended.

When Brandon got sick, our days and schedules changed significantly. 

<where I sound like I am ungrateful or bitchy, perhaps both? I'm not either, I promise.> 

He was no longer sitting in his office because it hurt too much for him to sit at a desk. He was now here in the space where I sit about fifty feet away from me. 

We had gotten him a lift chair as standing up unassisted became difficult. The quiet little space I had created for my "office" was now a space where the TV was on all day long and where another body filled the room, dogs were meandering around, etc.

I had some important stuff going on at work, but those things faded quickly and deeply with Brandon's diagnosis. My co-workers and boss understood and gave me a huge leeway. That presented some stress nonetheless, I tried to maintain normalcy which sometimes added further to my stress.

Where it started gradually, I was suddenly juggling an additional ball in the air. Wife first/foremost - not new although those dynamics changed, too. Worker - also not new, except for now sharing my work space with hubs doing his own thing IN that same space. The new ball was the new position of Caretaker. That included being a nurse, an Uber, an appointment keeper, a medication reminder, a medication giver, a wound caregiver, chef, housekeeping, therapist, etc., all while trying to maintain somewhere in all that, me. Very new, very huge, very stressful.

It was all a 24 hour job and I didn't have any ME time anymore. 

When Brandon died, I had an hour drive to make to get back home. I had back a "moment" of decompression where my whole life was suddenly and vastly different than it had been just a few hours earlier when I'd taken the drive in the middle of the night down to the hospital. 

That first "ball" of being a wife was gone. So was the third ball of being a caretaker. Right then and there, all I had left was the second ball and that was it. Continue to work, continue to exist and somewhere along the way, I have to figure out how to bring myself back into the equation.

That is where I find stuff difficult. I have a huge gap of time in between work and the sleep that ends one day and begins another to contend with. As that moment draws near Monday through Friday, a tiny part of me way deep inside feels a panic. 

It sounds dumb, but going from a million miles an hour to suddenly crashing into a brick wall and finding out you're still alive but very much alone after you wake up is kind of heavy. 

So, I write, I walk, I clean stuff, I talk to people if they're available, I put on music and balter goofily around the kitchen singing. I do busy stuff to occupy my new found huge gaps of time that for a while I did not have. 

I hate it. 

I am learning how to deal with it though. I have lists in my head of things I want to do once things have calmed down a little more, after I find my footing really is  secure.

I'm figuring out "why", "where", "who" and "when" and until that time I'm sort of just moving through the motions at the end of the day.