I can love them and still need recovery afterward

Dear Delyara, That sentence took me a long time to say without guilt. Family gatherings, calls, visits — even good ones — can leave me needing recovery. Not always because anything visibly bad happened. Because so much old emotional weather lives under the ordinary. The body anticipates, edits, softens, reads, remembers, adjusts. By the end, I feel more used up than the conversation itself seems to justify. I think love and fatigue coexist in families more often than we admit. That truth has made me gentler with myself afterward.