I am exhausted.
I spent three hours last weekend with my son’s best friend and his mom in the hot outdoors. We schlepped the kids around a local garden before the extreme heat warnings decided to kick in, so that they could quite literally touch grass, expend some of their endless energy, and roam the earth together. I spent the rest of that day solo parenting my two kids, then I went into the new week working on parent volunteer needs for my kids’ daycare, going on a coffee walk with my neighbor, spending time at the post office mailing out care packages and hand-me-downs to family & friends across the country, meeting new-er friends for pickleball, catching up with vendors at the farmer’s market, and making sure I sent an exorbitant amount of texts and voice notes to many of my closest girlfriends unpacking the latest episode (episode 7) of The Summer I Turned Pretty (my POV at the moment is jail time for all the characters + whomever approved the dance scene).
That’s only some of the care I give in my life. I am also managing caring for myself, my family (dogs included), and others in my orbit. I’m constantly learning how to show up for others in a way that doesn’t deplete me, or make me feel like I’m failing someone. The truth is: community care can be demanding, because caring for one another takes effort. It’s ‘happy birthday!!’ texts, but it’s also calling someone on your commute to check in on them. It’s holding the door open for the stranger coming into a store on your way out. It’s going to the get-together that you said you’d be at even though you had a long day and you don’t really feel like going out anymore.
It’s putting yourself out there to try an experience that’s exciting yet foreign, and a little (or a lot) intimidating. It’s not necessarily exhausting yourself to bits, but it is doing more than what feels comfy to you, because caring for one another and interconnectedness is what quite literally makes the world go ‘round. Community care is a form of self-care where in doing so, we’re creating a circular economy of care and creating harmony (Slow Factory has a great excerpt that speaks to this). It’s belonging, but it’s also working together to make belonging matter.
With my long list of community care wins from the past week above, I’m also not shying away from my failures — I’ve had to cancel group hangs, cancel twice with one of my oldest & dearest friends, and even took over a week to get back to a new mom friend I met while we were both trying to maneuver our big ass strollers through the kid’s snack aisle at the grocery store one morning a few weeks back. I have an email inbox unread in the thousands, and an actual box sitting in a corner of my room overflowing with miscellaneous items that I labeled with “TO ORGANIZE” in all caps. There’s so much of me that wants to find the magic solution to ‘doing it all’, while also acknowledging that I, in fact, do not have much figured out.
What I do have figured out is that my exhaustion comes from expelling care onto others in a way that a volcano expels lava. I am trying. Can I do less? Absolutely, but I know that I care enough to put in the effort (when I have the capacity to do so). I know many people dream of either starting or strengthening their communities, especially now as looming feelings of isolation and loneliness continue to rise. I look at the efforts that I put out as building bricks to a circular economy of care. When we choose to start and continue with this type of energy to show up for one another, we build spaces where everyone feels supported and a little less lonely. So, yes I am exhausted today. Beneath the exhaustion there’s layers of joy, mutual support, and genuine care.
