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The Shape of Isolation
There’s a strange kind of silence that comes with caregiving — not peaceful, not meditative, just… empty. The kind that makes you forget what your own voice sounds like.
Most days I don’t speak to anyone for hours. Sometimes the only words I say out loud are “That’ll be $70” to someone paying rent. Three minutes of human contact, ten times a week. Thirty minutes of conversation in seven days. That’s the total of my social life.
And the rest?
It’s me, the dog, the mountain, and the clock.
I hike when I can — an hour if I’m lucky — just enough time to remember I have legs and lungs and a self that exists outside the four walls of responsibility. But even that is squeezed between caregiving, business-running, and the constant vigilance of not waking Mom too early, not disturbing her, not creating ripples in a life that has no schedule.
She wakes anywhere between 9 and 12:30.
She goes to bed sometime after 11:30.
And in between, I’m orbiting her needs, her moods, her unpredictability, and her trying not to be a problem when she isn't one.
I don’t want to regiment her life.
But the lack of structure regiments mine.
I worked hard so I could travel, explore, live.
Now I’m stuck in a loop that feels like someone pressed pause on my future.
All my friends — the ones who know me, who laugh with me, who’d drag me out for a pint or a hike or a bit of craic — they’re in Ireland.
My whole sense of belonging is across an ocean. And here, in this place, I have one friend. One. And a dog who’s doing his best to keep me sane.
I run Mom’s business.
I don’t pay myself.
I tried to hire help — $600 a week for 15 hours — and Mom didn’t like them. She sat in the garage smoking instead. So the help wasn’t help. It was another layer of stress.
And somewhere in all of this, I feel reality slipping sideways. Like life is happening somewhere else, to someone else, and I’m watching it through a window I can’t open.
Isolation isn’t just being alone.
It’s being unseen.
It’s being needed constantly but known rarely.
It’s giving everything and receiving almost nothing back.
I’m tired.
I’m lonely.
I’m still standing.
But some days it feels like I’m standing on the last inch of myself.
This is the truth of it.
This is the part no one sees.
This is the part that needs to be said.
None of this means you don’t love them.
It doesn’t mean you’re shirking your responsibility or wishing it away.
It means you’re human — trying to hold space for someone else’s life while your own keeps shrinking to fit around it.
You want your mom to do more, not because you’re tired of her, but because you want her to reclaim pieces of herself.
You want her to have rhythm again, purpose again, something that isn’t just pain and smoke and waiting.
And you want to remember what it feels like to live your own life without guilt attached to every breath of freedom.
Love doesn’t erase frustration.
Responsibility doesn’t erase longing.
You can carry both — and still want more.
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