Hi, I’m tired.

Lately I do the bare minimum in pretty much all areas of my life. I am getting by, but I am doing nothing extra.

I am tired. I sleep a lot, and I want to sleep more. When I wake up, I am still tired.

My dad has been gone two months now. He left me a mess of a condo that I (along with my amazing team of three brave people who volunteered to take this on) am working on renovating to sell. One of most challenging issues was the resistant smell of cigarette smoke. The day we walked in and couldn’t smell cigarette smoke we almost cried tears of joy.

There’s some irony there since my dad (a lifelong smoker) died of respiratory failure and his wife died of lung cancer three weeks earlier.

The condo is over two hours away, so driving around to various hospitals and nursing homes to visit my dad has been replaced with trips to the condo.

I am not tired from working on the condo. Sure, it’s tiring, but it’s not why I’m tired.

I am also not tired from the various estate tasks I need to accomplish or the bills of my father that I am paying. (Side note: I am perplexed that his morphine in the last three days of his life was not covered by insurance. But morphine is cheap and I’m too tired to fight.)

It’s just that I’m tired.

I talk a lot about mental energy pennies. We all have limited mental energy pennies. You spend a small amount to watch a TV show or brush your teeth. It costs more to do a presentation, attend a work meeting, care for a loved one, or write a blog post. Hence, there was no blog last week. I was out of mental energy pennies.

We talk about this concept in terms of dementia. People living with dementia have decreasing mental energy as their disease progresses. However, the concept applies to all of us. And I find it’s particularly useful for caregivers.

I usually talk about mental energy pennies as a daily concept, as in “You wake up every morning and only have so many mental energy pennies.”

But I am now realizing that I was over-simplifying–because mental energy can roll over…as can a lack of mental energy.

Is it possible that I spent such a tremendous amount of mental energy in the spring that I borrowed against my summer mental energy? Maybe it’s like a credit card rather than pennies. Now I am paying back the mental energy I borrowed but with interest.

I am not telling you this for sympathy. I am telling you this because you can relate. Maybe you haven’t conceptualized it as mental energy pennies (or a mental energy VISA) but you get it.

I bought a book on productivity, but I haven’t been motivated enough to pick it up often. Yeah, I know. In the first couple of chapters, I was reminded of a trick….write down three tasks you will accomplish each day. Only three. I started by writing tasks like “clean house” but realized I needed to write more manageable tasks, “like clean bathroom.” Then I decided having a bathroom wasn’t that important and decided to take a nap.

It takes some mental energy to write a blog post, but I am realizing that it’s a good investment. I like to write. I like to share what I’ve written. Today I planted seven day lilies. It took some mental energy but the pennies I invested brought a return as I looked at the front of our house and thought, “Wow. That looks so much better.”

There are other ways I could spend my mental energy pennies that perhaps wouldn’t bring me a good return on my investment (like cleaning the bathroom). For now, I am choosing to opt out on those and respect that I am tired.

I won’t always be tired. I keep reminding myself that this is not the new normal. I will, gradually, feel like myself again.

If you are in the same boat, I see you. Dementia and caregiving steal mental energy pennies. If you have limited pennies, you get to choose where to spend them.

Maybe it’s not on having a clean bathroom (or maybe it is).

I could talk about nutrition, sleep quality, hydration, stress management, and exercise. There are strategies for increasing mental energy.

But sometimes it just takes time and patience to recover.