This week a beloved had a depressive episode. It was fast, rough, blessedly short, but it wasn’t necessarily how it was going to go. Hell, it hasn’t been long enough to actually convince me it’s over; it could flame up like embers stirred in the fireplace.

I felt immediately deflated. For all kinds of reasons, some good and some not so good, I’ve spent the last ~20 years caretaking through various mental and physical health crises. Overfunctioning is certainly part of it, but it’s also true that this beloved would be dead several times over without that caretaking.

This isn’t the first time that I’ve tried to find my wild, even if I called it different things. Each time, at some point, a crisis would show up and take up all of my time and energy and resources. Once it was over, I had to recover from all of that depletion, and I’d maybe get a little traction and then BOOM. Another crisis.

So it felt familiar, is what I’m saying.

It was an opportunity to choose what I’ve chosen before. But a different beloved said something recently about there being a difference between caring for someone and taking care of someone, and that landed for me. It’s the middle ground I’ve been longing for, the space that accounts for interdependence and taking care of people’s needs without letting someone else and their needs be the center of one’s world.

I chose differently. I didn’t abandon my beloved, but neither did I drop everything else to hover and manage. It might come to that at some point. It’s hard to know. But it was the right choice in the moment, and I can hold on to that the next time it comes up.