My mother needed round-the-clock care for fourteen months. I was the one who was available. I chose it. I would choose it again. These facts coexist without resolving.

I want to talk about what happened to me, which feels wrong even now, because the obvious response is that the person who was sick had it worse. That is true. It is also irrelevant. The self does not stop having needs because someone else's are larger. It just stops voicing them, over and over, until it forgets how.

I ate when she ate. I slept when she let me. I stopped calling friends because the answer to how are you was too complicated and too long. I stopped going to the gym. I stopped reading. I stopped having opinions about things that weren't directly relevant to her care. Somewhere around month seven I realized I had no idea what I wanted for dinner, for the first time in my adult life. I stood in front of the refrigerator genuinely unable to generate a preference. I had become so oriented toward another person's needs that my own had atrophied beyond detection.

She recovered. She is well. There was a celebration, which I attended in a state of dissociation I didn't understand until months later.

The recovery of self after that kind of dissolution is its own quiet project. I'm still working on it. Some things came back quickly - reading, the gym, the opinions. The wanting is slower. Learning to ask what I need, without first scanning to see if someone else needs something more, is the actual work. I'm not finished.

Have you ever lost yourself in service of someone you love? What came back when it was over, and what didn't?