One Caregiver's Lifesaving System Is Another's Pile of Guilt on a Shelf
The SANITY System™, Part 4 of 6: A Series on Advocacy, Organization, and Actually Surviving Caregiving | I — It Has to Fit YOUR Life
Just joining us? This is Part 4 of 6 — [start at Part 1] and work your way here.
A few years into caregiving, I went through a phase where I was absolutely convinced that the answer to my overwhelm was someone else’s solution.
I read the books. I followed the organized people on the internet with their matching containers and their laminated chore charts and their serene, uncluttered lives. I downloaded the templates, bought the planners, watched the tutorials. I color-coded things that did not need to be color-coded. I reorganized systems I had just organized. I was going to get it together, and I was going to do it using someone else’s very beautiful, very Pinterest-worthy method.
You already know where this is going.
Every single time, I would implement someone else’s beautiful system into my decidedly non-beautiful life, and it would work for maybe eight days. Then TJ would have a rough week, or we’d hit a wall with insurance, or Craig would travel for work and the whole rhythm I’d carefully constructed would fall apart in about 48 hours. And I would look at the wreckage of my very organized failure and think, what is wrong with me?
Nothing was wrong with me. The system just wasn’t mine.
Here’s the part I had to get really honest about, and it wasn’t comfortable:
What I wanted to do and what I actually had the resources to do were two completely different things.
I wanted a robust, comprehensive, color-coded system that tracked everything — every appointment, every medication, every insurance call, every IEP note, every specialist contact. I had a vision for what it looked like. It was beautiful, honestly. Organized within an inch of its life. The kind of thing that would make a project manager emotional.
And I had approximately zero time, a budget that did not include “elaborate organizational system,” and a mental bandwidth that was already stretched so thin I was forgetting to eat lunch on a regular basis.
The gap between what I wanted to build and what I actually had the capacity to build was significant. And for a long time, I let that gap paralyze me — because if I couldn’t do it the right way, the way I had envisioned it, then what was the point?
That thinking kept me buried longer than anything else.
Here’s what I finally had to sit down and get clear on, and what I want you to sit down and get clear on too: