Who Are You When You're Not Taking Care of Everyone Else?

Rediscovering identity, interests, purpose, and dreams outside of your responsibilities.

Someone asks what you do for fun, and your mind goes blank. Or you get an unexpected free afternoon and spend it doing laundry, because you could not think of what else you wanted.

You know exactly who you are in relation to other people. Mother, daughter, manager, wife, the one who remembers the birthdays and knows where the insurance card is. Ask who you are apart from all that, and the answer comes slowly, if at all.

That is not emptiness. It is what happens when a person's roles expand to fill every hour for years. The self underneath did not disappear. It has just not been asked a question in a while.

This has a name

In 1992, researchers Marilyn Skaff and Leonard Pearlin published a study in The Gerontologist on people caring for a relative with Alzheimer's disease. They described something they called loss of self: an erosion of identity that comes from being engulfed by the caregiving role.

They found it was more common among women, spouses, and younger caregivers. It was greater in those who had limited social contact and few roles outside caregiving. And it went along with lower self-esteem and more symptoms of depression.

That study was about an intense form of caregiving. But the mechanism is recognizable in gentler versions: when one role takes everything, there is less of you left over, and that costs something.

Notice, too, what protected people. Other roles. Other contact. A life with more than one room in it.

Why it happens to women in particular

Partly, it is arithmetic.

A Pew Research Center analysis of federal time-use data from 2021 and 2022 looked at married, employed adults. Husbands averaged about 28 hours of leisure a week and wives about 26. Among those with children under 18 at home, the gap was nearly three hours a week: 25.7 hours for husbands and 22.8 for wives. Pew notes that working wives spend more time than their husbands on caregiving and housework.

Three hours a week is roughly 150 hours a year. That is a lot of evenings in which one person had time to keep up a hobby, a friendship, or a private thought, and the other did not.

So if you have lost track of your own interests, the likeliest explanation is not that you are dull or that you gave up on yourself. It is that the hours went elsewhere.

Why it is worth the effort to find your way back

Because having something of your own is linked with feeling better, and with more than that.

Harvard Health reports on a 2023 study in Nature Medicine that pooled data on more than 93,000 adults aged 65 and older in 16 countries. Those with hobbies reported better health, more happiness, fewer symptoms of depression, and higher life satisfaction than those without. The study was observational and involved older adults, so it cannot prove that hobbies cause those benefits. Still, the pattern was consistent across countries.

A sense of purpose shows a similar association. A 2019 study in JAMA Network Open followed nearly 7,000 US adults over 50 and found that those with the strongest sense of life purpose had a lower risk of death during the study period than those with the weakest. Again, this is a link, not proof of cause.

You do not need a study to justify wanting a life of your own. But if you have been telling yourself it is frivolous, the evidence points the other way.

Start with clues, not answers

"Who am I?" is too big a question to answer on a Tuesday. Smaller ones work better. Take a notebook and give yourself twenty minutes.

Looking back

1. What did you do for hours as a ten-year-old without being asked?

2. What were you into at twenty that you quietly dropped? Why did it stop?

3. What did people used to say you were good at, before your roles took over?

Looking around

4. What do you read, watch, or look up when nobody is steering?

5. Whose life makes you a little envious? Envy is information about what you want.

6. When did you last lose track of time? What were you doing?

Looking ahead

7. If you had a free Saturday and no one needed anything, what would you do after the nap?

8. What would you try if you did not have to be good at it?

9. What do you want to be true about your life in five years that has nothing to do with anyone else's achievements?

If the page stays mostly blank, that is fine. Write "I don't know yet" and move to the next section. Not knowing is a starting position, not a verdict.

Run small experiments

Interests are not discovered by thinking. They are discovered by trying things and noticing how you feel. Keep the experiments small, cheap, and easy to abandon.

• If you are curious about: Making things

  • A two-hour, low-cost test: A library craft night, a beginner pottery session, one sketchbook and a pencil

• If you are curious about: Music

  • A two-hour, low-cost test: Dust off the instrument; sing in a community choir's open rehearsal

• If you are curious about: The outdoors

  • A two-hour, low-cost test: A guided walk with a local nature group; a morning in a public garden

• If you are curious about: Learning

  • A two-hour, low-cost test: One free online lecture; a single-evening class

• If you are curious about: Words

  • A two-hour, low-cost test: A book club meeting; three pages of writing nobody will read

• If you are curious about: Service

  • A two-hour, low-cost test: One volunteer shift, with no commitment to a second

• If you are curious about: Being with people

  • A two-hour, low-cost test: A regular coffee with one friend who knew you before

After each one, write down two things: "Did I feel more like myself?" and "Would I do it again?" Two yeses and it stays. Otherwise, cross it off cheerfully. Ruling things out is progress.

A caution about how you choose. Be wary of picking something because it would be useful: a hobby that could become a side business, a class that helps your career. The point is to find what you like, not to open another department of responsibilities.

Purpose does not have to be grand

"Purpose" can sound like a calling with a capital C. For most people it is quieter than that: something you care about beyond getting through the day.

Try finishing these sentences.

• "I feel most useful when I'm ___."

• "A problem I can't stop caring about is ___."

• "I'd like to be remembered as someone who ___."

• "Something I know now that I wish I could pass on is ___."

For some women, purpose is rooted in faith and a sense of what they were made to do. For others it comes from craft, community, justice, the natural world, or mentoring the next person coming up. No source ranks above another. The only requirement is that it is yours, and not simply the sum of what others need from you.

Your caregiving may well be part of your purpose. It just does not have to be all of it.

Protect a small space for it

The Family Caregiver Alliance, in its guidance for caregivers, recommends making requests that are specific rather than vague. Its example is a line like "I would like to go to church on Sunday," not a general plea for more help.

Borrow that directness.

• To a partner: "I've signed up for a class on Thursday evenings from seven to nine. I need you to handle dinner and bedtime those nights."

• To your family: "Saturday mornings until ten are mine. I'll be back for lunch."

• To a sibling sharing a parent's care: "I need one weekend day a month completely off. Which one can you cover?"

• To yourself, when guilt arrives: "Having a life of my own is not taking something from them."

Expect some resistance, including your own. A household that is used to your constant availability will notice the change. Hold steady for a month. People often adjust faster than you fear.

The feelings that come with it

Starting to look for yourself can stir things up. You may feel grief for the years you set your own interests aside. You may feel guilty, or foolish for being a beginner at forty-five.

All of that is ordinary. It usually eases once you are actually doing something you enjoy.

If what you feel is heavier than that, a persistent emptiness, a loss of interest in everything, or a sense that nothing would help, please talk with a doctor or a licensed therapist. Those can be signs of depression, which is common and for which help is available. In the US, you can also call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, at any time.

Try this today

1. Answer three of the nine questions, one from each group. Write the answers down.

2. Choose one two-hour experiment from the table and put a date on it within the next two weeks.

3. Tell one person, using a specific sentence: what you are doing, when, and what you need from them.

You have been many things to many people, and you will go on being them. You are also a person in your own right. It is your turn to find out more about her.

Sources

• Skaff & Pearlin, "Caregiving: Role Engulfment and the Loss of Self," The Gerontologist (1992)

• Pew Research Center: Working husbands in the U.S. have more leisure time than working wives do, especially among those with children

• Harvard Health Publishing: Having a hobby tied to happiness and well-being

• Alimujiang et al., "Association Between Life Purpose and Mortality Among US Adults Older Than 50 Years," JAMA Network Open (2019)

• Family Caregiver Alliance: Taking Care of YOU: Self-Care for Family Caregivers