I Made This for the Dread
There is a feeling that lives right between love and exhaustion and dread — the morning when you love your child with everything you have and your body is already tired before you have said a single word. This journal is for that feeling. Six sections. 38 honest pages. One place to put the weight before you carry it into the day.
There is a... specific feeling I used to not have a name for.
It would show up in the morning, usually around the time my eyes opened and before I had said a single word to anyone. A heaviness that was not sadness exactly. A bracing. Like my body knew what the day was going to ask of it before my mind had caught up, and it was already tired.
I LOVE my children. I LOVE my life... I chose this life on purpose and I would choose it again. And I would also lie there in those first thirty seconds of consciousness and feel something that I did not have the vocabulary for, something that lived right between love and exhaustion and dread, and I would not know what to do with it.
So I would just pick it up and carry it into the day.
If you are an autism or special needs mother, you may know this particular morning. The IEP is tomorrow. The behavioral shift you have been tracking for three weeks has not resolved. The appointment you fought six months to get is in two days and you have already been awake rehearsing what you are going to say to a room full of people who have had your child's file for forty minutes. Or nothing is specifically wrong. The week is just full. The week is always full.
You love what you have. And you brace for it anyway. And there has not been a clean name for that particular combination.
The Journal I Made From The Inside Of That Feeling
Earlier this year I made something for that specific experience. Not a workbook about productivity. Not a gratitude practice. Not a guide to becoming more positive about your circumstances.
A journal for the dread...
A 38-page fillable guided journal for the autism and special needs mother who loves her life and still sometimes braces for the day ahead. Six sections. Instant download.
When You're Dreading Your Own Life is a 38-page fillable guided journal for the woman who loves what she has and still sometimes wakes up bracing for it. It was written from the inside of this life, not from a comfortable distance observing it. Every prompt in it was shaped by the specific weight of being someone whose love for her child coexists with genuine, bone-deep exhaustion.
There are six sections:
The Naming — because the dread does not become smaller when you look at it, but it becomes more specific. Specific things can be worked with.
The Insight — what is actually underneath what you named. Not the surface story. The layer beneath it.
The Shift — not a reframe. A real movement. Something small that changes the texture of what you are carrying.
The Reframe — now the reframe. In that order. It works differently when you have done the other three first.
The Practice — the one thing you will actually do with what you found here. Not a list. One thing.
Free Writing — for everything that did not fit anywhere else. The unedited version. The part that does not need to be useful to anyone.
You do not have to work through all six sections in one sitting. You do not have to be in crisis to pick it up. Some days it is a full practice. Some days it is a single section in the parking lot before you walk back in.
A Few Things This Journal Is Not
It is NOT a productivity tool. It is NOT asking you to optimize anything. It is NOT going to tell you to wake up earlier or find the silver lining or reframe your challenges as gifts...
It is a place to put the heaviness. To name it. To look at it. To find the one small thing you can do with what you found when you looked. And then to keep going, because you were always going to keep going — you just needed somewhere to put it first.
How To Get It
When You're Dreading Your Own Life is a fillable PDF, available now through The Refinery for $17.
A 38-page fillable guided journal for the autism and special needs mother who loves her life and still sometimes braces for the day ahead. Six sections. Instant download.
You download it once and it is yours. Fill it in digitally or print it. Return to it on the heavy mornings. Start over on a new page when you need to.
GET THE JOURNAL INSIDE MY PLATFORM →
If you already have a Refinery account, sign in and it will be there waiting. If you do not have an account yet, creating one is free and takes about two minutes.
The dread does not mean you are failing at your life. It means you are in a life that asks an extraordinary amount of you, every single day, without a break, and your body knows it even when you do not say it out loud.
This journal is for saying it out loud. Even if only on paper. Even if no one else ever reads it.
That matters. You matter. This is for you.
— Cheniece ♡
When You're Dreading Your Own Life is available in The Refinery at portal.cheniece.app for $17. It is a fillable 38-page PDF, immediate download, yours to keep. Learn More
A 38-page fillable guided journal for the autism and special needs mother who loves her life and still sometimes braces for the day ahead. Six sections. Instant download.
