What it means to be a carer

Caring for someone who can do little or nothing for themselves means looking after their every need. Life takes on an incredibly focused intensity. You literally have no time or sense of time. You are wrapped up in someone else's needs. Interactions and negotiations with the other person to get those needs fulfilled.

Time looses any meaning as you concentrate on the constant tasks at hand. There are many, enough to fill both hands to overflowing. There is no one else coming to relieve you or offer you a break. You are so caught up in constant activity that hours melt away and there is never enough time. Everything is urgent, yet you have to select only the most essential thing to do next and discard the rest for some imagined time in the future that never seems to come.

You are the only one keeping this person going and you know you must not fail in it. Love means that you will do anything for them and by your actions you do. A total investment of your being. Caring is the ultimate lesson in responsibility and can be an ultimate expression of love.

Writing for me is like performing an exhausting feat of strength. Most of the time, I am not strong enough.

To me, writing has always been a frustratingly elusive skill, with poetry being the most so. Struggling academically in my youth to learn the basics, I slowly pulled level with my peers, hoping to use one of the few skills I had in daily life. This was not to be.

The best analogy for my frustration is the way a fantasy writer might render thier descriptions. Like a two-edged sword, where the blade will cut my self as much as anything else. Or like trying to access an illusive spiritual or magical power source. On an ordinary day, as unreachable as the sun. But in fleeting moments of extreme crisis and elation, when painful or euphoric emotion is caused in my brain, I am able to force my way through a boundary, to pull words instantly from the ether onto the page.

If only I had this skill all the time I would be published by now and able to make a living from it. Sadly, I am able to do this only a few times each year. And not so sadly, for if I could do this all of the time, it might mean that I was in crisis all the time. Alternatively, I might be so happy in my social and romantic life, that I was in a state of euphoria most of the time. That is the highest form of aspiration to me, always prompting those thoughts laced with such trickery that lead me to procrastinate: Perhaps then... Maybe tomorrow...