For the days nobody counts what you carry. Essays about invisible labour and being seen.
This is not a dramatic essay about crisis or collapse. It is about something quieter — the slow accumulation of small moments that eventually add up to a realisation. Dependency, even when it comes wrapped in love and good intention, is a trap. Even the loving kind.
There is a kind of exhaustion that does not show up on your face. You still show up. You still manage. But somewhere beneath all of that is a heaviness that has been there so long you have stopped noticing it. Like furniture you have walked around for so many years you no longer remember choosing it.
She worked in my home for six years. Every time I see her — cheerful, unhurried, arriving with a smile that has no business being there given everything she carries — I think the same thing. Would I have her grace?
After eighteen years of relocations, motherhood, caregiving, grief, and putting everyone else first, I began tracing the quiet thread back to myself — through writing, memory, and the parts of me that never fully disappeared.
