The Feral Truth About Trying to Work While Caregiving

The Feral Truth:

There is no balance.

There’s just… juggling and hoping nothing important hits the ground.

You’re working.

Technically.

Logged in.

Answering emails.

On calls.

But you’re also:

• listening for movement in the next room

• watching your phone for doctor calls

• mentally tracking medications while pretending to care about a meeting

You’re in two places at once.

And somehow…not fully in either.

Because the second you start to focus on work—

something happens.

A question.

A need.A symptom.

A “can you come here for a second?” that is never actually a second.

So you pause your job

to handle real life.

And then you come back

to your job like nothing happened.

Except everything happened.

And now you’re behind.

Distracted.

Trying to remember what you were even doing before.

So you work faster.

Later.

In weird pockets of time that don’t feel like real time.

Early mornings.

Late nights.

In the car.

In waiting rooms.

You squeeze a full-time job into the cracks of a full-time caregiving role.

And people who aren’t living this?

They don’t get it.

They see:

you working from home flexibility “at least you can be there”

They don’t see:

the constant interruptions

the mental whiplash

the exhaustion of never being off in either role

Because there are no boundaries here.

No clean start.

No clean stop.

Just overlap.

All day. Every day.

And the pressure?

It comes from both sides.

Work still expects you to perform.

Caregiving doesn’t care that you have deadlines.

So you sit in the middle

trying not to fail at either.

And some days?

It feels like you’re failing at both.

Even though you’re doing more than most people could even imagine handling.

That’s the part that breaks you a little.

Because you’re not just tired.

You’re split.

Constantly.

And there’s no clean way to fix that.

So you keep going.

Answering emails with one hand, handling everything else with the other, telling yourself:

This is temporary.I’ll figure it out.I just need to get through today.

Again.

And again.

And again.

That’s the Feral Truth.

Yours in chaos,

~Kari, The Feral Caregiver