What Caregiving Took From Me and What It Left Behind

My father was diagnosed when I was in my final year of university. The timing was, in the clinical sense, inconvenient. I was supposed to be finishing my dissertation, preparing to graduate, looking for work. Instead I was learning what his medication schedule looked like, navigating the hospital system alongside my mother, and trying to understand information that required a medical background I did not have.

I did not drop out. I am proud of that. But I also did not have the final year I had been expecting. I attended lectures and came home to a different life. I wrote my dissertation in a state of fragmented attention that I am still a little amazed produced something acceptable.

After I graduated, I moved home. I told myself it was temporary. It was two years.

I want to be accurate about what those two years were, because I think the narrative around caregiving often moves too quickly to what it gives you. The perspective, the growth, the depth of relationship. All that is real. It existed. But alongside it, and this is the part that is less often said, was a very particular experience of loss.

I lost the early-twenties version of my life that I had been imagining. The version where I moved to a new city and made mistakes and figured things out through trial and error without the weight of what was happening at home. I lost the spontaneity of that age. The ability to say yes to things without calculating the impact on the care schedule. The particular freedom of not yet having serious responsibilities.

I also sometimes, in my worst moments, lost myself. My own thoughts. My own priorities. There would be weeks where I could not have told you what I actually wanted, separate from what was needed of me. That is a disorienting thing to discover about yourself.

“There were months where I could not have told you what I actually wanted, separate from what was needed of me. That is a disorienting thing to discover about yourself.”

My father is in remission now. He has been for eighteen months. I have moved out. I have started building the career I put off. I have started rebuilding the friendships that sustained long-distance through those years and am slowly, in some cases, rebuilding the ones that did not.

The relationship with my father is different than it was before he was ill. Not worse, actually. More honest, in some ways. There are things we said to each other and things we did together during that period that would not have happened otherwise. I carry those.

What I am still figuring out is who I am now that the primary shaping experience of my early adulthood was caregiving. It has left things. A specific kind of patience. A fluency with difficult conversations. A low tolerance for things that do not matter. A slightly higher-than-average awareness of the fragility of
ordinary life.

It also left gaps. Things I did not get to develop because I was developing something else. And I am twenty-five now and I am trying to figure out how to fill them in while also not feeling like I missed something irretrievable.

I do not have a conclusion to that yet. I suspect that is okay.

What I do know is that the experience is real and the cost is real and caregiving at any age, but especially young, deserves to be talked about with the full complexity it contains. Not just the parts that make the giver look selfless. Also the parts that hurt. Also the parts that are still being worked out.

If you were or are a young caregiver, this is for you. Not to make it lighter than it was. Just to say someone else was also in it.