Last week was exciting for me, I was invited to take part in a panel discussion on the impact of caring on mental health in London. Spoiler alert – it is not great. If you want to understand how caring affects me mentally, you can read some of my more miserable blogs here, here and here.

I gladly accepted, happy for the excuse to escape for a few days despite the logistics challenge that entails. Plus, as a former Londoner, I was curious to see if I still had my get-out-of-the-way-London-walk and my luck in getting a free coffee from Pret A Manger (both powers are still intact, I’m happy to report).

The panel line up was interesting, it featured two working mums and me and looked to tackle caring more broadly as it relates to mental health. I must admit, as I prepared for the session, that I was a bit sceptical about equating being a working parent to an unpaid carer. As every carer who read the preceding sentence will be thinking: BEING A PARENT AND AN UNPAID CARER ARE NOT THE SAME THING.

I know.

I was ready to gently point this out at the panel – that even thinking that being a parent was similar to being a carer was a sign of how much not-yet-carers don’t ‘get it’. As the discussion progressed, however, I listened to other panellists’ experiences and was struck by some similarities in our lives. Yes, I could tell that my day-to-day life was completely unfathomable to the audience politely listening to me, but I felt that some of my experiences were at least vaguely recognisable to the panellists. One of them said my life reminded her of being in the newborn phase of bringing a baby home: getting no sleep, being completely consumed by keeping another human being alive with no idea how to do it. I often say that living with and looking after a 99 year old is like having a toddler who drinks and talks back. I’m joking when I say that but unpaid carers can relate to the sleep deprivation and the anxieties of caring for loved ones with no training, help, or information.

The panellists had also experienced the lack of medical and social care, in a different capacity, but those feelings are essentially the same. They also understood the depersonalisation that comes with being an unpaid carer, becoming a parent can also provoke that feeling of losing yourself and your identity. We were also three women talking about the burden of care, in any sense, unfairly and all too often falling on us. We were all doing the best we could fuelled by love (plus caffeine and slight rage in my case).

As I listened to their stories, I thought that maybe finding our common ground was the way to get through to people when it comes to explaining the inexplicable life of an unpaid carer. I don’t know what it is like to be a mum, mums don’t understand what being an unpaid carer is like but we both can relate to our similar experiences and maybe develop a better understanding of each other through our common ground.

To all the unpaid carers reading this, bear with me on this. I know it is natural to vent and forcefully tell everyone how difficult, draining, and exhausting our lives are. I get it. I want to vent and let my frustration out just as much as you do. However, to get real change, we need everyone to have a sense of what our lives are like, they need to relate on some level to pay attention and take it seriously enough to want to help and support us.

I think we need to change the way we talk about unpaid care to make it relatable, to shock people into wanting to help – not just call us heroes and move on. That will require a change in how we describe our experiences, perhaps even to sanitise them a bit to make them more palatable to a non-carer audience. That’s where the difficulty lies and where I lose some unpaid carers. How do we retain the authenticity of our experience while trying to make it widely relatable? How do we engage with a non-carer audience in a relatable way to warn them about something dramatic they will likely experience when they don’t want to believe or hear it?

This is where my grandmother comes in – who doesn’t love a cute old lady? In these blogs, I purposefully mix in lighter, funnier, grandma stories that non-carers can find amusing and hopefully start to engage with the less retable content if they choose to read more posts.

Speaking of grandma, the first thing she said when I came home was: ‘So you didn’t get stabbed then? It shows lots of that happening on the news.’ I do really live with a toddler who drinks, talks back, but is hilarious.

P.S: If you have any thoughts on the questions in the blog, please leave me a comment.