©ESR 2025

⚠️**Content Advisory** Caregiver burnout

Now that the sky is quiet,
I don’t know what to do with the silence.
It presses in
like guilt in the morning,
like a question I never studied for.

The tornado left
but it took my name with it.

I walk through my apartment
like I’m trespassing.
So much space,
so much stillness.
No pill reminders.
No chart of symptoms.
No voice calling,
asking if I’m there.

I am.
But barely.

There’s dust on my hobbies.
Photos I don’t recognize on my own walls.
A coffee mug I once loved
that now feels foreign in my hand.

I forgot how to sit
without flinching at the sound
of nothing happening.

I forgot how to eat
without swallowing urgency
along with the food.

Who am I,
if not a daughter burning at both ends?
Who am I,
without the list,
without the crisis,
without the endless need?

I try to write,
but the words feel slippery.
I try to sleep,
but my body doesn’t believe
it has permission yet.

Rebuilding sounds brave
in theory—
but in practice,
it’s making one small meal
and sitting with it.
It’s showering
without a clock ticking beside me.
It’s putting on a dress
just to feel the weight
of something that isn’t sweatpants and sorrow.

I keep looking in the mirror,
as if I might catch a glimpse
of the woman I was
before I unraveled
into someone else’s emergency.

She doesn’t answer.

But there’s a whisper,
low and persistent:
“You’re allowed to begin again.”

And so,
I make the bed.
I open the window.
I let the air touch skin
that has only known burden.

The world doesn’t ask anything of me today.
And that terrifies me
more than any storm.

But maybe—
maybe that’s how healing starts.
Not with joy.
Not with purpose.

But with space.