All The Tumbles

you asked, I answered

Trying to prove a point to my divorce lawyer.

Ya wcw

But also if all you do is reblog this link, your help would be greatly appreciated. I know there's a lot going on in the world, but any little bit of good we can put into it is so worth it.

I love my friends and relatives, but sometimes it just gets a bit too much. And the difficulty is, when you try to explain it to non-medics it’s hard to put across. I get questions like “but how can you not care about your [friend/cousin/etc]?”, or something like “but I’m busy too, you’re not the only one who works hard”. But that’s not what it is. It’s not that you don’t care, it’s that your emotional reserves are exhausted.And it’s not that you necessarily work harder than most people (though you work harder than some, TBH), but that your work has its own particular emotional and intellectual intensity arising from the decisions you make which leads to compassion fatigue. And that’s something particularly pronounced in people in the caring professions. It’s like; imagine you’ve run a marathon. You’re exhausted, your muscles are screaming and you’re a gasping mess on the floor. Now, if someone comes up to you and pulls a knife on you, it’s still going to be incredibly hard to get yourself up to run away because you’re already exhausted. It’s not that you don’t care about what’s going on; clearly you have reasons to be motivated. But you can’t use energy that isn’t there. And that’s what it’s like. When I’m feeling it, like I did recently, it’s not that you don’t care. It’s not that the situation isn’t important enough, or the people don’t matter enough, it’s that you’ve cared so much, for so many people that you are out of reserves and have reached a point where you need to recuperate before you can help again.