The Invisible Load

Some years ago, a woman I coach, I will call her Naina, said something to me I have never forgotten.

We were twenty minutes into our session when she put down her cup, looked at me, and said, “Lovina, I am so tired. And I cannot even explain why, because on paper, I have not done anything that counts.”

I want you to understand who was saying this. Naina ran a team of forty. She had just delivered the biggest account her company had signed all year. She was also the daughter who called the pharmacy when her father’s medicines ran low, and the mother who never once sent her child to school with the wrong textbook. And she sat across from me, genuinely believing she had done “nothing that counts,” because not one of the things quietly draining her had a name.

I have thought about that sentence for years. Because I have heard a version of it from almost every woman I have ever worked with.

There is a kind of work that never appears on a job description, or a chore chart, or anything the people around us can see. It is the work of noticing. Of anticipating. Of remembering. Of smoothing the edges of a day before anyone else feels them. I call it the invisible load. And once you learn to see it, you cannot unsee it anywhere.

Let me take you into three lives.

Naina, at work

Naina was the reason her office ran, and no one could point to how. She was the one who knew a key client’s daughter had just started college, so the small talk always landed. She was the one who noticed the new hire had gone quiet in meetings and checked on him before he quietly resigned. She was the one who found the broken number in the deck at eleven at night, fixed it, and said nothing.

In every appraisal she was “so dependable,” “the glue,” “the one we would be lost without.” And then, last spring, she watched a colleague get promoted above her for being “a strategic thinker.” Naina held the whole strategy together with her bare hands every single day. It simply never had a name, so it never made the list, so it never counted.

The one that holds everything together is rarely the one the title goes to.

Divya, at home

Divya can walk into a boardroom and command it without raising her voice. But at two in the morning I once got a message from her that just said, “my brain will not switch off.”

It was never one big thing. It was the school form due the next day, and the shoes her son had already outgrown, and her mother-in-law’s prescription running low, and the gift for the birthday party on Saturday that no one else had remembered was even happening. Her husband, by every measure a good man, “helped whenever she asked.” And that was exactly the trap. Because the asking was hers. The remembering was hers. The holding of the entire moving list in her head, so that she could hand him a task at all, was the heaviest job of all, and it was invisible even to the person sleeping beside her.

The heaviest job in the house is remembering there is a job at all.

Reema, inside her own life

And then there is Reema, and the quietest load of them all, the one she carried inside her own life. Reema was the person everyone called when they were falling apart. The sister at midnight. The friend mid-divorce. The colleague in tears in the parking lot. She held all of it, absorbed all of it, kept every room she entered calm.

Somewhere long ago she had decided, without ever saying it aloud, that being needed was the same as being loved, so she never, ever put any of it down. I remember asking her once, very gently, “Reema, and what do you need?” She opened her mouth to answer, and nothing came. She told me later it was the first time in years anyone had asked.

The woman everyone leans on is usually the one no one thinks to ask about.

Making it visible

Here is what I have come to believe, after two decades of sitting with women like Naina, Divya and Reema. They are not doing too little. They are carrying what was never theirs to carry alone, and no one is stepping in, because no one can even see it. And you cannot renegotiate a load that no one will admit exists.

So the work begins with making it visible. I walk the women I coach through three quiet moves.

• First, see it. For one week, catch every invisible thing as you do it, the noticing, the remembering, the smoothing, and write it down. Most women are quietly shaken by the length of their own list.
• Then, name it. Out loud. To your manager, to your partner, to yourself. Naming it is the exact moment it stops being “just how things are” and becomes something that can change.
• And then, renegotiate it. Hand one thing over completely, not as a task you will still be quietly supervising. Or set it down and let it stay down. It will feel uncomfortable. Do it anyway.

Naina did this. She kept her list for a week, walked into her review, and for the first time named the work that held her team together, then asked for two pieces of it to be given to someone else. Divya stopped handing out tasks and handed her husband a whole territory instead: the children’s school, all of it, the remembering included. Reema started saying, once in a while, “I don’t have the space for this today,” and discovered the people who loved her did not leave.

None of them became less capable. None of them became less loving. They simply became less invisible.

See it. Name it. Renegotiate it.

And maybe that is the real question I would ask you this week, if you were sitting across from me with your own cup of tea going cold in your hands:

What is the one thing you carry, every single day, that no one around you calls work?

Name it. I read every single one.

This piece first appeared in The Transformation Playbook, my weekly newsletter on LinkedIn: one idea a week, for women rising at work, at home, and in their own lives. If it found you today, send it to one woman who needs it too.