Who Am I When Everything Revolves Around His Illness?

A number of years ago, an upper-level administrator made a comment that has stayed with me ever since.

My supervisor was nearing retirement. I wasn’t sitting around assuming anything was guaranteed, but I had done the work over many years. I knew the students, the systems, the rhythm of the job. I had built a career in international education that I was proud of in a steady, unremarkable way. I was the person people relied on when things needed to get done and done well.

At some point during a conversation, the possibility of eventually stepping into my supervisor's role came up. The administrator remarked that I likely wouldn't be considered for the position because of my travel limitations related to my husband's illness.

Maybe it was meant as an observation. Maybe it was an offhand comment. It wasn't presented as a formal decision, and I don't know whether that person could have made one on their own. But I knew they had influence. I knew they had the ability to shape conversations and perceptions. And the comment landed hard.

It wasn't about my performance or my experience. It was about travel.

I remember sitting there thinking, almost quietly to myself, is that really it?

My supervisor hardly traveled. And no one asked me what "can't travel" actually meant in my life. There was no conversation about what was possible, what was flexible, or what I might be capable of despite the realities I was managing at home.

What stayed with me wasn't the comment itself so much as what it seemed to reveal. Somewhere along the way, a conclusion had already been drawn about what opportunities were available to me.

When I left, I didn't talk to anyone. I went straight to my car and sat there for a while without starting the engine. I remember just holding the steering wheel, not ready to move yet, trying to make sense of why the conversation had affected me so deeply.

There are moments like that that don't feel large when they happen. They feel almost ordinary. But later you realize they quietly change your sense of what your life is allowed to hold.

At first it was shock. Then it shifted into anger, though not the kind that has anywhere to go. It stayed with me in a quieter way, showing up later in ordinary moments when I would think back and try to make sense of it.

I kept coming back to the same question, not always consciously at first, but it was there: how had something so central to my work become so easily narrowed down?

I had been good at my job. I cared about it deeply and showed up every day doing work that mattered. And I don't think of this as the end of anything.

During that same period, I started paying closer attention to other ways I could build stability and options for myself. Part of it was practical. Part of it, if I'm honest, was a reaction to being told what might no longer be possible.

I enrolled in part-time graduate coursework, and later law school courses, not because I had a clear plan mapped out, but because I wanted to keep learning, keep growing, and keep reminding myself that my future had not already been decided.

I was trying to make sure I still had movement in my life if one direction felt less available.

And yet something outside of work had already started to define what I was allowed to become.

My husband had been living with a serious illness for some time by then. And without really noticing it, I had already started organizing my life around it. Not in theory, but in practice. Appointments, uncertainty, days that didn’t go as planned, and a constant low-level calculation in the background of whether I could leave work quickly if I had to.

Some days I barely registered that I was doing it. It had become part of how I moved through the day.

I never blamed him. I couldn’t. He didn’t choose this.

He used to apologize sometimes, unexpectedly. He would say he was sorry that his illness had changed everything, that it had taken so much from us, that it had made our life smaller than it was supposed to be.  Those moments were hard in a way I still don’t fully have language for.

There are things illness does that no one chooses, and still, everyone ends up living inside the consequences.

For a while, I stayed angry about that conversation.

And then I got tired in a way that didn’t feel like something that could be fixed with rest. It was a deeper exhaustion, the kind that builds slowly over years of holding too many things at once without really naming it as that.

At that point in my life, I needed stability more than anything else. I needed a job that was predictable. I needed health insurance I didn’t have to worry about. I needed supervisors who understood that I might have to leave without warning. I needed coworkers who didn’t require explanations every time life interrupted work.

From the outside, that might have looked like a lack of ambition. From the inside, it was what made everything else possible.

Because at home, nothing was predictable. Some days were fine. Some weren’t. Some changed suddenly and without warning.

And when you live inside that kind of uncertainty long enough, you stop thinking in terms of ambition and start thinking in terms of what can realistically hold.

So I stayed. And life just kept moving.

Eventually, I moved into the interim role anyway, and later into the director position full-time, even though the realities of caregiving had not changed.

That still surprises me sometimes when I think about it. Not because it resolves anything neatly, but because it complicates the version of the story I used to tell myself.

At the time, the comment felt final. Certain in a way that shut everything down.

It wasn’t.

But it also wasn’t simple.

Because in the middle of all of it, I was still living a second life. One shaped by caregiving, by illness, by constant adjustment that didn’t always have words attached to it.

Every decision carried more weight than it otherwise would have. Could I take on more at work? Could I be doing more at home? What happens if something goes wrong today? Who needs me more in this moment?

Those questions don’t feel like ambition or lack of ambition. They feel like something more basic than that. Responsibility. Survival. Care.

And over time, they begin to shape what you believe is even possible for yourself.

I didn’t see it happening at first. Not clearly. Only later did I realize how many of my decisions had been made inside narrowing parameters I didn’t choose but also couldn’t ignore.

The promotion wasn’t the beginning of that story. It wasn’t the end either.

It was just one moment where I could suddenly see the shape of my life a little more clearly.
And it raised a question that has stayed with me in quieter ways over time.
Who am I when everything revolves around someone else’s illness?

Reflection: Permission to Want

It’s funny how caregiving changes ambition. The things you want can start to feel indulgent, even selfish. I would catch myself thinking I shouldn’t want this, that I had other responsibilities that mattered more in that moment.

But desire isn’t always betrayal.

Wanting something more—clarity, focus, growth—isn’t evidence that you are failing someone else. It’s evidence that your inner life is still moving. That you are still alive in your own story, not only in someone else’s.

I started keeping a small notebook of wants. Nothing formal. Sometimes just a sentence, sometimes just a word or two. It became a quiet practice, a way of letting desire exist without immediately shutting it down.

Not everything in it turns into action. That was never the point.
The point was simply not disappearing from myself.

Reflection Prompt

What is one thing you secretly want right now that you haven’t given yourself permission to name?