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Illustration by Christine Wei
It started with the loot bags. Not a meltdown, not a crisis. Just me, sitting on the kitchen floor at midnight, painstakingly tying ribbon around tiny bags of dollar-store trinkets for my child’s birthday party I was too tired to plan in the first place.
I wasn’t mad about the loot bags – not exactly. I was mad that no one else even thought about them. That the invisible checklist in my head had become a full-time job no one applied for, and yet, here I was: the CEO of Everyone Else’s Needs.
The birthday party snacks. The RSVPs. The backup pack of juice boxes in case someone doesn’t like apple. The weather app check to see if we’ll need sunscreen or rain boots. The internal calculation of which parents might judge me if I forget the compostable forks.
It’s not about the forks. It never is. It’s about the unspoken expectation that I will just … know. That I will remember. That I will handle it. That I always do.
Emotional labour isn’t loud. It’s not shouting in a meeting or slamming a door. It’s a quiet erosion of the self, disguised as competence. It’s the running tab of tasks no one sees but everyone benefits from. It’s anticipatory. It’s invisible. It’s exhausting.
And sometimes, it takes something as small as a loot bag to show you how big the weight has become. There’s this moment – if you’ve been there, you know – when you’re doing the thing that no one asked you to do, but would absolutely notice if it didn’t get done. And you feel yourself unravel just a little. You feel the resentment sneak in like steam under a closed door.
You wonder why no one notices. Why no one thinks to ask if you’re okay. Why no one ever says, “Hey, I’ll handle this one. You go rest.” Instead, it’s: “Where’s the sunscreen?” “Did you get wrapping paper?” “What time does the party start again?”
And you smile. And you answer. Because that’s what strong women do, right? We hold it all. We make it look easy. We take pride in the lists and the planning and the follow-up e-mails. We joke about being Type A or the “mom friend” or the glue that holds everything together. But glue isn’t glamorous. Glue is what gets everywhere and holds things in place while slowly drying out. No one asks how the glue feels.
The thing about quiet rage is that it builds slowly. It simmers under the surface, hidden beneath a veneer of capability. It doesn’t explode – it erodes. You start to lose pieces of yourself in service of everyone else.
The world calls it love. But real love – true support – doesn’t live on the back of one person carrying everything alone. Real support is shared. It’s active. It looks like someone noticing without being asked. It’s a partner who buys the lightbulbs before you even realize they’re out. It’s a friend who says, “I’ve got this – go rest.” It’s someone who sees you unravelling and doesn’t look away. It’s not perfect. It’s not always pretty. But it’s present.
When you’ve been holding everything for too long, it feels like a full-body exhale. Like someone finally reached for the six grocery bags you were hauling in one trip, looked you in the eye and said, “Let me.”
The truth is, I don’t want a medal for doing everything. I want a team. I want someone else to remember the loot bags. I want rest that doesn’t have to be earned through burnout. I want space to be messy, complicated and cared for – not just useful.
So, yeah, it started with the loot bags. But it’s not really about them. It’s about all the things we do out of love that can slowly lead us to forgetting ourselves. It’s about the quiet rage that builds in silence. The radical act of saying: I deserve better.
Sometimes, revolution starts with a ribbon. And ends with a woman who finally puts herself on the to-do list. Permanently.
Kelly Young lives in Kelowna, B.C.
