Can You Still Be Creative While Caregiving?

On By Marquessa5 Comments

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Have you ever tried to be creative while someone else’s needs run your entire day?

Not just busy, not just tired. But responsible-for-another-human-level tired — the kind where your brain is still managing medications, appointments, moods, bowel movements, and safety even when you finally sit down. That’s the space I’ve been trying to write from since mid-2021. And I won’t pretend it’s been easy.

I’m still unconvinced that creativity and caregiving can truly co-exist for me. They are both full-time emotional jobs and pull from the same well. And some days, that well feels very, very low.

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Still, last month I made a promise to myself to write one hour a day.

Not for the blog and not for readers but just for me.

Some days that hour goes fine and I find it hard to stop after the hour. On other days when “fun” writing eludes me, I write about how I ended up here, buried under exhaustion and responsibility. On those days, giving up feels like the most reasonable option in the world, an option I have taken many times in the past. But now, I’m forcing myself to show up anyway, because if I don’t protect this small piece of a creative life, it will disappear completely.

From the outside and to the readers of this blog, it might look like I missed posting my “weekly” posts but the truth is that some of those posts were just too heavy to share. And let’s face it, everything doesn’t need to be shared on these internet streets. It will take time for me to figure out how to balance being true without letting every post sound heavy and I’m a slow learner these days.

The last thing I want is for the hard days to become the only story I tell.

To make myself feel more optimistic, I’m trying to adjust my mindset. I’m slowly accepting that this is what my creative life is supposed to look like while caregiving…not long uninterrupted writing spells or bursts of perfect inspiration where I can jump onto my laptop and empty my head. It will continue to be about small steps, one hour a day with a decision not to quit.

If this post feels a little like the start of a conversation, that’s because it very well might be. I think this may be the beginning of a short stint mini-series, like an honest look at what happens when I try to hold onto my creative self while caring for someone else. The routines that help, the emotional obstacles that show up, the guilt of wanting to take time for myself, the small victories, and the unexpected ways creativity can survive anyways…

For now, I’m still here. Still writing. Still chugging along.

Not perfectly. But consistently.

M

Note:👉 I publish my longer-form posts here on my blog, which is home for my writing. Substack is where I speak about the work and stay in conversation.

“A” is for Afflicted

On By Marquessa5 Comments

“Two people can only keep a secret if one of them is dead.”

Out of all the things my Abuela used to say, out of the warnings and the blunt observations delivered without apology, that was the wisest and truest thing to ever come out of her big, uncensored mouth.

Dexter was the love of my life until I tried to kill him.

I don’t say that for shock value. And in the heat of the moment, I can’t honestly say that I was conflicted about what I did. That realization bothered me long after the fear did.

But I’m not going to write about that just yet.

If you want the whole truth and nothing but the truth, you’ll have to be patient with me. Whenever I think about what happened, none of it feels real. It feels like something I dreamt and then forgot to wake up from, that is, until my body reminds me otherwise.

Until I remember the pain of almost having my roots pulled out of my scalp the last time Dominic and I were alone together. Or the first time that he punched a hole into the wall of my living room inches away from my head. That’s when everything crashes back in, and I’m left with the same question I still don’t know the full answer to: why did I stay with him as long as I did?

The secret I’ve been keeping has been eating away at me. No matter what I do, it keeps bubbling up, pressing against my chest, looking for a way out. I’ve never told anyone everything, at least not the whole story. I’ve learned how to share pieces instead. Edited versions. Safer versions.

But I can’t carry this quietly anymore.

I need to get this weight off my chest, and the only way I know how to do that is by writing it down. If I were really smart, I wouldn’t do it online where people could stumble across it. But I need to tell my story and figure out how I ended up here instead of replaying everything over and over in my head.

This space is meant for me but even if someone stumbles across this, who would even care about my incoherent ramblings?

Still, just in case someone does find this, please know this: I am not a bad person. I did what needed to be done to free myself. I took my Abuela’s words to heart and chose survival.

Maybe you’ll help me piece things together. Maybe you’ll see something I didn’t want to see at the time, though I think I already know where it all went wrong.

I’m writing this anonymously, so I won’t tell you my real name. You can call me Cara—short for Caramel. That was my Abuela’s nickname for me because she loved the color of my skin. She used to say I was like burnt sugar: sweet, with a bitter aftertaste.

Had she seen something in me back then that I only recognize now? Did she understand how secrets survive, the way they can demand silence and how they rot when you try to keep them?

Like Abuela said, “Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead.” Fortunately for me, I’m the one still breathing.

Cara

Some Days Are Saturdays

On By Marquessa6 Comments
Dad on the beach – one of his favorite places

Today, it has been four years, but some days are still Saturdays.

It doesn’t matter what the calendar says. I can wake up on a Tuesday or a Thursday and feel it immediately—the weight of that morning settling back into my body. The quiet. The knowing. The way time slowed down just before everything changed.

That Saturday began around 4:00AM. I noticed his breathing first. It was different—laboured, uneven. I had been caring for him around the clock and knew every sound his body made by then. I never left his side. I was always afraid that if I did, something would happen. Worse, that he would think he was alone. I could not allow that. And I never did.

I woke my brother, who had been sleeping on the living room floor every single night since the diagnosis – showing up after dealing with clients all day. Then I woke my other brothers who were staying in the house and called the remaining brother to come immediately. No explanations were needed.

The living room had become the center of our lives, ground zero for the hospital bed that had been there for months. It changed the room, and it changed us. Months before, we had all laughed with him about how the living room had gone from a place where we had never been allowed to linger as children to a room where everything difficult and important happened – from bolus feedings and post-chemotherapy injections to meaningful conversations about things we had all silently and collectively felt but to which we had never given a voice.

We gathered around him and talked to him. Told him we loved him. Said the things people say when they don’t know which words will be the last ones that matter. As the sun started to rise through the bow window, lighting up the snow outside, we turned the bed so he could face the window. It felt important that he feel the sun on his face.

We held his hand. We leaned in close. We told him that we loved him and that he didn’t need to worry about us, about Mom, about anything he was leaving behind. He already knew we would take care of each other; we always had and always would. Our bond as siblings had always been strong. Still, we said it out loud, convinced that he could hear us.

Every time we thought he had taken his last breath, he hadn’t. Each pause felt final. Each new breath broke our hearts all over again. There was no single moment—just a slow realization that this was happening whether we were ready or not.

And by 10:10AM, he left us.

I would do it all again. The exhaustion. Every sleepless night. Every hard moment. I never left his side because I never wanted him to feel alone, and if I had to, I would make that same choice again and again and again.

On this very day, four years later, grief hasn’t softened into something tidy or distant. It isn’t something I can move past. It’s just something that I carry. Grief has simply learned how to live alongside everything else in my life.

Some days are lighter. Some days are ordinary. And some days—no matter what day of the week it’s supposed to be, it is sometimes still a Saturday.

Note:👉 I publish my longer-form posts here on my blog, which is home for my writing. Substack is where I speak around the work and stay in conversation.

Rewriting as a Way Forward: Finding My Way Back to Writing

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As a child, fiction writing was more than a hobby; it was a refuge. It was where I shaped worlds, stepped into other people’s lives, and explored emotions I didn’t yet have words for.

Like my love of books and reading, writing was my escape.

As I grew older, my story ideas deepened, shaped by the realities of my life and the challenges I learned to navigate. Writing helped me confront feelings I didn’t always have the space or energy to face directly. My characters often carried pieces of my own experience, grappling with familiar struggles. In giving them a voice, I could indirectly voice mine.

Fiction became a bridge — a bridge between the world and me – a bridge between my past, present, and what I dreamed could be the future me.

There was something deeply comforting about putting pen to paper and watching my thoughts take shape in ways I could control. Of course, over time, life became heavier. Responsibilities multiplied. Time thinned out. My mind filled with stories — scenes, characters, half-formed beginnings — all crowding for attention, with very little time and energy left to bring them to life.

And now, in the midst of past death, lingering grief and an every-present “long goodbye”, the stories still have never left.

As I sit down to write this now, in the one daily evening hour that I am trying to carve out for myself as my form of self-care, I feel a small, quiet hum of creativity — a melody I once cherished and am ready to slowly rediscover this year.

Rather than forcing something new, I’m choosing a gentler way back. I’m flipping a few pages behind me and rewriting an old story I shared long ago — one many people enjoyed and one I never returned to rewrite as I had promised.

I’m hoping that revisiting this story — slowly, patiently, and with a slightly different narrative — will be a way forward.

Not a step back, but progress.

A reminder that sometimes the path ahead begins by returning to what once mattered, trusting that in rewriting one story, I may finally make room for all the others still waiting to be told.

Note:👉 I publish my longer-form posts here on my blog, which is home for my writing. Substack is where I speak around the work and stay in conversation.

What It Cost Me and the Quiet Loss of Self

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My life hasn’t unfolded in clean chapters or hopeful arcs. It’s been layered, tangled, and shaped by years of choices I made because I did not know that choosing myself was an option. Beginnings and endings blurred together, and more often than not, I didn’t realize that something was over until I was already carrying it into the next season of my life. I’ve lived a long time in service—to family, to work, to friends, to other people’s needs—telling myself that being needed was the same as being fulfilled. Well, it wasn’t.

For years, I ignored my own needs because everyone else’s came first. There was always someone to care for, something to fix, a role to play. I learned to swallow questions I had and moved on without answers, because stopping to process my feelings felt selfish. But unresolved questions and situations didn’t disappear just because I kept going. They piled up in my spirit. They followed me around like shadows. They multiplied, and without resolution, my mind could never truly rest. I replayed conversations, doubted my instincts, and wondered how much of myself I could give away to keep the peace.

I’m not about to romanticize my sacrifices. A few of them made sense, but many were learned habits rooted in obligation, culture, and survival. Being the strong one, the dependable one, the one who can always get the job done – it came at a cost. It taught me how easily a life can be shaped around service while neglecting oneself.

It’s not an easy thing to admit – some of what I poured my energy into may have been appreciated, but much of it was not poured back into me. It’s an even harder thing to recognize how often I stayed too long, accepted too little, and told myself endurance was strength. Emotionally working for others might have helped others propel forward with their lives, but it has left me right where I started and not where I wanted to be. 

Now that there is little left to set down from the burdens I should not have carried, I am finding myself in a bit of a conundrum of wanting to reclaim the little energy I have left versus wondering why I should even bother now that my circle has become so small.

What I do know is that I will move forward, less willing to disappear for anyone else because I am finally deciding that my life, what’s left of it, deserves to be lived with some “main character energy” for myself and my fiction writing.

Note:👉 I publish my longer-form posts here on my blog, which is home for my writing. Substack is where I speak around the work and stay in conversation.

Embracing a Year of Slow Writing…2026

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I’m entering 2026 differently than I’ve entered most years of my life.

Not with declarations.
Not with big promises.
Not with a long list of things I’m supposed to fix about situations or myself.

Instead, I’m choosing slowness—especially with my writing.

For most of my life, I learned to move quickly and without question for other people. To produce. To respond. To be useful. To help. To be “Miss Fix It” as my Dad often called me. Writing, when I did start making space again for it by creating this blog many moons ago, often carried that same pressure: say something meaningful, say it well, say it as perfectly as possible. But that pace doesn’t suit me anymore and even if I had the capacity, I couldn’t do it under current circumstances.

So this year, I’m committing to a slow writing practice—one piece a week, over the course of 52 weeks. Not as a performance. Not as a middle finger to those who turned up their nose at my pleasure for writing as a means of discouragement. Not like all the past writing challenges upon which I embarked via WordPress courses (and have since removed from the blog). And definitely not for likes, follows and content just for content’s sake. This is about showing up consistently for me, myself and I without forcing urgency where it doesn’t belong.

Some weeks the writing may be long. Other weeks it may be brief. Some pieces might feel resolved; others won’t. What matters to me is the practice itself—the act of returning to the page, again and again, without rushing myself toward clarity or closure.

This approach is also about authenticity. I’m no longer interested in trying to polish my life into something aspirational, easy to consume or social media worthy. I want to write from where I actually am: thoughtful, questioning, frustrated, sometimes tired, sometimes exhausted, sometimes clear. Writing slowly gives me room to listen to myself instead of writing past my own truth for the sake of pretty words.

I’m also being intentional about where this writing lives. My blog is and will be “home”. That’s where my longer-form work will sit, where pieces can breathe without interruption. When I eventually venture back to Substack, it will be a place for reflection, context, and connection—a threshold, not the house itself. I’m learning that boundaries and clear lines matter, even in creative spaces.

This 52-week practice isn’t about productivity. It’s about presence. It’s about letting writing be my companion rather than another demand. Some weeks I’ll write about memories, service, loss, aging, creativity, or maybe even the cost of becoming who I needed to be for everyone else. Other weeks, I may simply write about what I’m noticing around me. And who knows, I might even through in some fiction if that’s what I feel like doing for a certain week.

I’m giving myself permission to take the time it takes.

If you’re reading along this year, thank you for your patience and your curiosity. There’s no destination I’m racing toward. Just a steady return to the page, one week at a time.

And for those who have been with me from the beginning of this blog, for a clean slate, I have removed all old posts. It means a lot to me that you are still around.

Note:👉 I publish my longer-form posts here on my blog, which is home for my writing. Substack is where I speak around the work and stay in conversation.

Rekindling Creativity Amid Grief

On By Marquessa3 Comments

As I sit down and force myself to write this post, the familiar hum of sadness is in the air – a melody I have been listening to for a long time.

The desire to write is still very deep in my soul but it’s the grief topped off with more ambiguous grief that has killed the creative muse I used to have.  

The muse began to die a few years before the pandemic when I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that something was definitely wrong with her. I was barely coming to grips with that ambiguous grief when the world stopped and another part of my creativity disappeared into more duties as a dutiful daughter. Then when the world started becoming less scary, I wanted to slap myself for not pushing through the stress to take advantage of the slower pace of things and get some writing done.

But you know how Murphy’s Law works, right?

Just when I was pumped to get those creative juices flowing again, that’s when the cancer diagnosis came and my priority was to help him fight a battle he would never win.

Some feeble writing attempts here, there and somewhere. A few weak tries at reviving this blog space and my newsletter.

It’s been over three years since I’ve written any kind of fiction. I’m not even sure if I still know how to write. But I’m here, with low expectations and willing to give it a try even if it’s quick blog post.

Because I really don’t want the stories that I have within me to quietly die without a fight.

I mean, what do I have to lose?