This month, I’m not sure of the exact date, I will have been a carer to my grandmother for six years. This fact takes my breath away.

I feel an overwhelming sense of waste – of valuable years of my life gone. I feel trapped. I want to scream and run, get away and escape. Being a carer wasn’t my choice but, through others’ decisions and the UK’s weaponised incompetence on social and healthcare matters , I am stuck in this situation. Over the last six years, my life has dwindled down to an existence.

Some say there is beauty in what I do. To accompany an old lady at the end of her life. I don’t see it, if it does existed.

I don’t see the beauty in my constant back ache that disappears the moment I leave the country in the rare escapes I get; or in the depths of my loneliness. What’s beautiful about my ever-shorter fuse or exhaustion? I don’t see the beauty in my lack of appetite – for anything. There is no beauty in my constant tearfulness either.

I’ve become invisible, weighed down by shouldering my caring responsibilities alongside my work ones on my own with no help, day after day. I’m not important to anyone, the work I do is, but my worth as a person has vanished. I only matter in relation to the person I care for. Our society chooses to bury its head in the sand over the growing care crisis, and I’m out of sight and out of mind for most of the people in my life.

I also don’t want to see any beauty in this situation. We shouldn’t glamourise care when it is at the cost of the carer’s life. This shouldn’t be OK or normal – for anyone. No matter what their circumstances are or how they became carers, nobody should have to give up their lives completely for others. My reluctant devotion is now normalised, there is no gratitude or concern for what I do from my family. What’s the point? Laura will handle it. She always does.

And I do. Everything gets done, on time and to the best of my ability. But at what cost?

I’ve come to realise that the cost is me; I’m the price tag.