Let something of you be left.

It started as something temporary. Now you organise your week around how that person is, you sleep with one ear open, and it’s been a long time since you thought about what you might feel like doing. This course isn’t about the person you care for: it’s about you.

Holding someone up for a long time wears anyone down: it’s been measured, with no differences by sex, by country, or by the illness of the person receiving care. So this isn’t about enduring more. It’s about the anger and the guilt that appear and what they mean, the respite that has to go in the calendar because otherwise it never arrives, and asking in a way that works. One lesson a day, for seven days.

The seven days.

1. 01 This one is about you Why carers lose the reference point for their own state.
2. 02 The anger and the guilt Not a failure of love: a symptom of exhaustion.
3. 03 The respite that never arrives on its own If it isn’t in the calendar it doesn’t happen — because there’s never spare time.
4. 04 Asking in a way that works Small, specific, with a day and a time, and to a person with a name.
5. 05 Understanding it tires you less No longer reading as personal what is a symptom.
6. 06 You aren’t the only one Hearing someone name out loud what you don’t dare think.
7. 07 Let something of you be left What it takes to still be there a year from now.

And an eighth email, a couple of days later, gathering it all onto one page — and saying plainly where this course stops being enough.