I want you to think about 2 PM on a Tuesday. Where are you? Probably sitting at your desk, struggling to focus on the task that actually pays your mortgage. But where is your soul? Your soul is sitting cross-legged on the cold tiled floor of a public restroom stall, the door locked, the HVAC fan roaring uselessly overhead, trying to create enough noise insulation so your whispering doesn’t betray you to the staff walking past.
The Real Job vs. The Paid Job
This is the scene: you are on a three-way call, juggling a provider, a biller, and the automated phone tree of an insurer, desperately trying to dispute a charge for $4,333 that should have been covered. The PowerPoint deck waiting outside? Worth $143,003. But the dispute right now determines whether your father loses his rehabilitation coverage, threatening his independence and triggering a catastrophic deductible reset. Which job is the real job?
We talk about ‘caregiving’ as a gentle, altruistic pursuit, usually framing it through the lens of emotional support: the holding of the hand, the reading of the book, the sharing of the memory. And those moments are sacred. They are the 13 minutes of sunlight in a week defined by institutional shadows. But the reality for millions of people-predominantly women-is that 80% of their time isn’t spent













