The Journey I Didn’t See Coming
Well-being has always been the most needed pillar in my life, but the one I misunderstood the most. As a high achiever, I thought I had it all figured out—keep moving, stay fit, push through. But as the years pass, I’ve learned that well-being is not a fixed point. It shifts and evolves, especially when you find yourself navigating the middle ground between raising children and caring for aging parents.
I am not old, but my body, with time, is no longer as young as it used to be. And that too has changed and continues to change everything.
And these realizations have opened my eyes to the deeper layers of what well-being means.
Myself: Body, Mind, and Spirit
There’s a kind of hum that comes with aging—not the sharp clang of a warning bell, but a soft murmur in the body, a subtle tug on the spirit. My body, once so full of endless energy, now asks for more. More rest, more care, more time. I am not old, but I am no longer young in the same way I once was.
And yet, amidst the unfolding of this quieter rhythm, there was the burnout—creeping in like a shadow I didn’t see coming. Overwhelm sat heavy on my shoulders, and loneliness settled in the spaces I had ignored. I didn’t want to hear the call, didn’t want to face the truth that I couldn’t outrun this exhaustion. It took time to slow down, to realign.
Well-being, I’ve learned, is about more than just maintaining. It’s about tending—tending to the body as a garden, pruning where necessary, watering the parts of me that had dried out. It’s about making space for rest, for stillness, and for the soft voices of the spirit that often go unheard. My well-being now requires more than it used to—but in that need, I’ve found a kind of grace, a deeper connection to myself.
Parenthood
I am a single parent, raising one child, and every phase—from the tender days of being a new mother to now guiding a teenager—has been a constant ebb and flow of losing my identity and reclaiming it, again and again, in new ways. Motherhood has been both my crucible and my greatest gift. My child is a wonder, and being his mother has transformed me, broken me open, and rebuilt me in ways I couldn’t have imagined. But the truth is, motherhood has been a journey of holding the miraculous in one hand and the ridiculously hard in the other.
There’s joy in every moment of seeing him grow, but there’s also the unrelenting challenge of finding myself amidst the demands of nurturing another. I’ve celebrated the small victories, the miraculous moments of connection and growth, but there have also been days when the weight of it all pressed down on me, leaving me breathless with exhaustion. Each stage of my child’s life has asked me to redefine myself—not just as a mother, but as a woman, a person who still needs to be seen, cared for, and whole.
And then, like an unwelcome guest, burnout, overwhelm, and loneliness arrived—creeping in through the cracks of my devotion. I didn’t see them coming, didn’t want to admit that I was losing myself in the process. But they were there, lingering in the quiet spaces between the love and the struggle. It has taken time, and many small steps of self-care, to realign, to remind myself that my well-being matters just as much as his.
Parenthood, for me, has been about learning to balance the giving with the receiving—knowing when to pour into my son and when to pour back into myself. It’s an ongoing dance of surrender and strength, of love and boundaries, of joy and fatigue.
Family: The Sandwich Generation
Caring for children is one kind of giving. Caring for aging parents is another. I have lived at the intersection of both, caught between the vibrancy of raising my child and the quiet, inevitable slowing of my parents. This space—this delicate, tender place—has defined so much of my journey. The days stretch long, filled with responsibilities, with love that pours in both directions, and with a weight that can be hard to name.
I’ve lost one parent, my father, to cancer. Navigating life without him has been its own kind of grief, its own lesson in resilience. His absence lingers, and in caring for my mother as she grows older, I am constantly reminded of that loss. I find myself cherishing the time I have with her, but also feeling the weight of watching her age. All the while, my child needs me too, pulling me in another direction, asking for a different kind of care, a different kind of attention.
Amidst this role, burnout crept in like a slow-moving tide—unnoticed at first, until it was too heavy to ignore. The overwhelm of being needed on all sides, the loneliness of feeling like I had no space to breathe, no room to simply be. I didn’t want to see it, didn’t want to admit how deeply it all weighed on me. But there it was, creeping into the corners of my life, pulling me in too many directions at once.
I’ve had to learn that well-being, in this space of caregiving, means carving out room for myself in ways I never had to before. It means stepping back when I need to, giving myself the grace to say “not today” without guilt. It means asking for help, something I resisted for so long. I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that I can’t do it all, and that well-being, in the sandwich generation, is about boundaries—about knowing when to give and when to retreat, when to care for others and when to fiercely protect my own space.
Well-being has become about honoring my own needs, even when the world is asking for more. It’s about understanding that while I give so much of myself to my child and my aging mother, I must also reserve something for me. Because without that, I’ve learned, the weight of it all becomes too much to bear.
Relationships
Well-being is a thread that weaves through our relationships. I’ve learned that it’s not just about how I care for others, but how I allow others to care for me. For years, I thought well-being was about being strong, about showing up for everyone without faltering. But in that strength, there was a quiet exhaustion. A loneliness I hadn’t expected.
The burnout came, not because I wasn’t loved, but because I hadn’t allowed myself to receive that love fully. I was so busy giving, I forgot that I, too, needed to be held. The overwhelm settled in, the quiet hum of loneliness echoed through my relationships, and I didn’t see it coming.
Well-being in relationships, I’ve learned, is about reciprocity. It’s about allowing others to hold space for you, to give as much as they receive. It’s about letting yourself be vulnerable, about asking for help, about leaning into the love that surrounds you. I’ve had to learn to let others care for me, to soften the edges of my own self-reliance, and to allow space for mutual support. Well-being is not just an individual pursuit—it is something we cultivate together.
The Pour:
An Invitation The Ever-Shifting Nature of Well-Being
Well-being is a living, breathing thing. It is not static, not something to be achieved and left alone. It shifts with us, grows with us, and demands more of us as we move through different seasons of life. This Well-Being Diary is my exploration of that journey—the times when I ignored the signs, the moments of burnout, and the quiet rediscoveries of what it means to care for myself.
Burnout, overwhelm, and loneliness are not things I wanted to confront, but they found me. It took time to learn how to realign, and how to nurture my well-being before those shadows settled in. Now, I know that well-being is a practice—a tender, ongoing act of self-care, of listening, of allowing myself the space to grow and rest.
I hope that through these reflections, you will find your own path to well-being. You will learn to honor the whispers of your body, mind, and spirit before they turn into shouts. And that you will know you are worthy of the care you give to others, and the care you give to yourself.
0 Comments for “Gathering of the Tea Leaves: The Well-Being Diary”