entry 005

04.16.26

56000 photos & videos. it's taken me the last couple of weeks to work through these in my spare time, systematically saving them to an ssd and deleting. i can't describe how good it feels to get them off my phone and computer and out of my icloud drive. don't get me wrong, i love all these photos. there's so much i never even posted. i think that's the hard part. they distract me every day, and i get annoyed at the space they've been taking up. every time i've tried sorting through them, i got crushed by the overwhelm. and i didn't want to get rid of any of them. so, i've found a middle ground. as long as i know they're somewhere, that's enough.

i've been helping my aunt take care of my uncle for a while, and my sleep schedule is fubar. my uncle is in his 80s, recently became totally paralyzed from the chest down, and he has worsening dementia on top of many pre-existing mental health conditions, such as ptsd. i haven't talked about this, but it's been a challenging experience. first, the situation itself, and second, the decision to leave- knowing how difficult it is. my aunt is almost 80 herself, and she can't lift him, and that's something we have to do numerous times a day. she's living two lives now, mostly at the expense of her own. i wonder what will happen after i leave, whether i should just stay a bit longer. it's brutal. for her, this isn't temporary. it can only end one way. she's one of the strongest people i know. if the roles were reversed, i don't think he would've done half as much for her. and now he just calls her names and belittles her 90% of the time. he says the most terrible things to her. he's cruel unless he's heavily medicated, and it's hard to ignore. i never thought i could or would do something like this, but i imagine neither did she.