Just like an angsty teenager, caregivers are so misunderstood
Hey don’t compare me to an angsty teenager.
Alright my bad! I won’t do that again.
When my fiancée, Sarah, received her breast cancer diagnosis, no one ever told me that my brain would completely betray me. “Wait a sec!”, I thought. These new caregiver feelings and emotions suck! It really caught me off guard how new and strange everything felt after Sarah’s diagnosis. In our daily lives pre-cancer, it’s easy to breeze through the days. However when cancer hits, it really slows things down. And not in a good way. The normal routines get flipped on their head. You start learning how to navigate this new life while just trying to survive. Then those pesky feelings of a cancer caregiver start creeping in. When I realized that I had never experienced thought patterns like this before AND my friends and peers around me were definitely not experiencing this, it hit me hard. Does that sound familiar to you?
With this article, I hope to validate the thoughts and feelings of a cancer caregiver that others may be experiencing. If any of these resonate with you, just know that you are not alone. Without further ado, here are 10 challenging, complex, paradoxical, isolating, and/or difficult to understand feelings of a cancer caregiver.
- I need to be an emotional rock for my partner. But wow this is really hard. How long can I keep up this emotional rock persona?
- I don’t want to make my friends and family uncomfortable, so I’ll downplay the negative parts. I’ll just pretend that things are going better than they actually are.
- Wow, I really need a break. But my partner is the one with cancer and needs me. I absolutely should not and cannot take a break from being my partner’s support.
- My partner was always my main emotional support and the person I lean on when times are tough. Now times are the toughest, but my partner’s support is nowhere to be seen. How can I support her and get through this without any support of my own?
- All our friends and family are so supportive of Sarah and see that she is a strong fighter. Why do I kind of feel like I’m losing my own identity in this process? I’m just feeling more and more like “the caregiver” and less and less like myself.
- Caregiving is causing me to lose so much momentum in my life. Meanwhile, all I can see is all my friends move through life care-free. Man, I’m so unlucky. Will I ever catch up?
- All the plans we had for our future came to a screeching halt. I can’t stop thinking about what our future looks like now. But aren’t I only supposed to be thinking about supporting my partner in the present?
- My partner puts on a brave face for everyone else, but at home she unleashes all of her pain and stress. And that pain and stress is all directed at me. Am I wrong to be angry or upset with my partner? Am I just supposed to ignore the hurt it is causing me because she has cancer?
- I thought caregiving would at least mean that the romantic relationship that I have with my partner would remain largely unchanged. Why does it feel like cancer introduced a new caregiver-to-partner relationship? Does our previous relationship dynamic still exist?
- I feel absolutely crazy for having these thoughts. It feels like they contradict themselves, and they make me feel like a horrible caregiver. Am I a monster for having these thoughts?
I know these are difficult emotions and difficult times, so please let me know if you’ve had any similar thoughts! I sincerely hope you haven’t but hope you find comfort knowing you’re not alone in case you have.