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Please share your caregiving experiences and perspectives in the comments section below! Please think about the following to help you along! Most importantly, stay mindful that it’s impossible to do it wrong! If sharing isn’t feeling helpful to yourself, chances are significant that you’re helping someone else to just keep going! You might help them remember who they are. You might help them save their own life or that of their loved one.

Are or were you a caregiver, a patient, a “caregivee,” a healthcare professional, an employer of a caregiver, or a friend or family member witnessing someone’s caregiving journey? Caregiving is not limited to these things! Do or did you have a high maintenance pet, caring for whom is/was socially unacceptable, embarrassing, interrupting your momentum? Maybe you’re “just” a single parent. Maybe you found yourself reentering the workforce when your partner was forced to exit the workforce unexpectedly, causing an instant switch in parental responsibilities.

How about all of us who work(ed) with or parent(ed) children and adults with physical disabilities, terminal illness, developmental delays and/or autism? Talk about dismissed and forgotten. You especially rock! How will you support your nonbinary child when you fear most that they’ll be a target, always in harm’s way? What if it’s possible that they’re going to be just fine?! What? Your grandkid’s now a they? And so is their circle of friends? What? Oh my gosh, are they trying to take over? Believe it or not, every generation is smarter than the last. Remember those Veterans? A wealth of wisdom and new intelligence! Our most precious treasures.

For the first time in human history, there are 5, yes FIVE, generations living together on our planet! What if collaboration is all we need to save our species? What if we’re just in a phase of evolution that’s in turbo mode? Things ARE happening fast! We CAN adapt! How will denying that increase our precision?

Which generation do you represent? How do you think your generation can make a difference? What new brain-based information are you learning about collaborating with the other 4 generations? Do you think caregiving only touches a select few generations? You’ll be surprised. Just read some of the other posts. What can we learn from each other? How can we apply that learning to our work lives, our families, our friendships, our communities? What do you think?

Caregiving really is a thing. More than the white elephant of alcoholism and other addiction in the room, nobody wants to acknowledge caregiving. Yet it’s going to touch us all if it hasn’t already. Let’s just talk about it. And let it be OK. The more we discuss it, the more likely we’re going to feel positive when the subject comes up. It’s there, it’s big, it’s getting bigger and it’s not going away. Shuddering and protecting ourselves by avoiding it isn’t going to make it go away. Is that really preparing us to experience it? And is that really facilitating healing or growing from our experience? Is that healing our communities? Is it helping our species shift to thriving?

The thing is, social pain hits our brains the same way as physical pain. Our brain doesn’t know the difference, even if our mind wants to. How are we going to preserve our dignity and that of our loved ones by continuing to allow ourselves to be dismissed and suck up our fears just to keep the peace? How dare we make a wave, right? That’s very real too. It can cost our loved ones their lives. It can cost us our own lives. It’s happening everywhere, every second of every single day.

We’re competing with the expert brain. Until the experts really get how their expert brains can undermine their expertise, we’re all pretty stuck. And guess what? We’re all experts. We all have expert brains. And we’re all leaders. Yes. We are all leaders. Outthinking our brains is the challenge. As we build the site, we’ll share resources to help us all do just that. Together, we got this!

Please share your caregiving experiences! Please share anything else that you would like carefume.com visitors to consider and/or discuss. Also, please share any suggestions to improve or easify the carefume.com visitor experience. Our goal is to provide transparency, trust and meaningful conversations about the realities of caregiving. It IS possible for it to be good. It’s our responsibility to make it good. Good resources, good companies and good products will also be acknowledged and shared as we find them.

Perhaps you found an awesome company or product along your way. Please share that and we’ll see if we can connect with them through carefume.com. Maybe you know of an amazing resource that will help others! Internet searches for resources, companies, products can be overwhelming when we’re over our eyeballs in the exhaustion and emotion that caregiving can create. And feeling defeated can happen fast when we find dead ends, like the service is discontinued, the company has been out of business for over a decade, the shelter is full, the program no longer exists, grant approval is immediate but the waiting list is 3 years.

In hindsight, what would you say helped you get through? How did you find yourself coping? What tips, tricks, hacks, advice can you share to help others in their caregiving journey? The GOOD can push the bad and the ugly out of the way. It’s time. Let’s do this.

Thank you for visiting! Thank you for sharing your caregiving stories and perspectives!