The Identity Shift: Who You Become When Caregiving Changes Everything

Caregiving changes more than your schedule. It changes your identity. In this deeply personal solo episode of Chat with Nat, Natalie opens up about the emotional, mental, and financial shifts that happen when caregiving becomes your daily reality.

From managing medications and hospital equipment to grieving the freedom and spontaneity of life before caregiving, Natalie shares the truth so many caregivers quietly carry: I do not even recognize myself anymore. But she also reminds listeners that caregiving can create resilience, purpose, perspective, and strength unlike anything else.

This episode is an honest conversation about grief, guilt, burnout, financial pressure, and the importance of protecting your own future while caring for someone you love.

What you will hear:

• The identity shift caregivers experience and why no one prepares you for it
• How caregiving changes relationships, routines, priorities, and freedom
• The emotional reality of grief, resentment, exhaustion, and guilt
• Why caregivers must still protect their financial future and emergency savings
• How caregiving builds resilience, patience, leadership, and emotional intelligence
• The importance of support groups, community, and being seen by others who understand
• Why you are allowed to still have dreams, goals, joy, and personal growth while caregiving
• How Natalie balances caregiving, business ownership, and prioritizing family

If you are a caregiver, supporting a caregiver, or preparing for a future season of caregiving, this episode will help you feel less alone and more understood.

This podcast covers caregiving, caregiver burnout, caregiving and finances, financial planning for caregivers, money management, elder care, and balancing caregiving with work and life. Chat with Nat: Conversations That Count helps caregivers feel supported, informed, and confident in both their care decisions and financial future.

Get my FREE Financial Check-up Guide

Connect with me on:
Facebook
Instagram
LinkedIn

The content shared on this podcast is meant to support and inform, but it is not a substitute for professional financial, medical, or legal advice. Please consult with a trusted professional who can guide you based on your individual needs and circumstances. 

Transcript

1:00:00

(Upbeat Music) Caregiving changes more than just your schedule. It changes you. One day, you're living your normal life, building a career, making plans, and dreaming about the future. And then suddenly, you become the medication manager, the advocate, the appointment scheduler, the overnight caregiver, the emotional support system, the strong one. And somewhere in the middle of taking care of everyone else, you start wondering, what happened to me? Today, we're talking about the identity shift that no one prepares caregivers for. The grief, the growth, the guilt, and the unexpected strength that comes from becoming somebody entirely new. Today's episode is brought to you by Casa de Confidence Productions. Julie and Dan Collins are the kind of team that every podcaster dreams of. They're supportive, professional, communicative, and incredibly talented at helping your voice come through clearly and confidently. So if you've ever thought, maybe I should start a podcast, go connect with them at casadeconfidence.website and have a conversation about what that could look like. Welcome back to Chat with Nat, Conversations That Count, where we talk about life, money, caregiving, resilience, and building a future that still matters, even when life doesn't go according to plan. This episode is especially personal because caregiving doesn't just affect your calendar, it affects your identity. The last few months as I have started sharing my caregiving journey more, as I have started immersing myself in groups where I can get support, where I can just be seen and be heard, and I can provide those things back to other caregivers as I'm walking the same journey. I literally see this multiple times a day. I don't know who I am anymore. I've completely lost my identity. I go nowhere. I talk to nobody. Everything's changed, and I don't know how to get back to it. The truth is, you're changing in a way that will shift you forever. And while you may never get back to exactly who you were before, I think there's ways and possibilities that even going through the journey, you can hang on to pieces of yourself and create someone even more amazing than ever on the other side of caregiving. If you're feeling like you don't even recognize yourself anymore, today's conversation is for you. Here's my money tip this week, y'all. When your identity changes, your financial priorities usually change too. A lot of caregivers experience that reduced income, paused career growth, increased expenses, emotional spending, neglecting their own future planning, all things I talk about constantly on my episodes with my clients and on my social media, because they are so important. Nearly 60% of family caregivers are employed while caregiving, and many reduce hours or leave work entirely due to those caregiving demands. Women caregivers lose an estimated hundreds of thousands. Honestly, I believe it's right around 300,000. I think I quoted in maybe last week or the weeks before's episode. But they lose hundreds of thousands of dollars over their lifetime in lost wages, retirement savings, and benefits due to caregiving interruptions. You cannot abandon your future while protecting someone else's. Even in survival mode, you have to keep contributing something towards your future. You have to know what your numbers are. It's a necessity that you build flexibility where you can, and you protect your income and your emergency reserves. The caregiving season can last for a lot longer than people expect. So if you lose track of preparing for your financial future, you may not have time to get things back on track. If you have questions about this area, of course you can always reach out to me through the show notes or connect with me on Instagram at Natalie McPhee Kime. I would love to have a conversation and see how I can support you. Take a look at where you're at and just give some reassurance or some direction and what you wanna continue doing moving forward. All right, let's jump back into this week's episode and talk topic. I wanna start by talking about the version of you that quietly disappears. The loss of spontaneity, the constant hypervigilance, feeling emotionally on call at all times, becoming needed every single hour of the day, and the shift from daughter, son, spouse, niece, nephew, aunt, whatever it might be to caregiver, okay? Here's what happens. There is a moment that you realize your life has now fundamentally changed. A moment you look around and think, this is my reality now. I've had multiple of those moments through the progression of my mom's dementia diagnosis from having my parents move here three and a half years ago and still being fairly able-bodied. My mom would use a wheelchair if we went out and about, but in the home, she was able to manage things herself. And honestly, things stayed pretty steady at that level until last fall, just before Thanksgiving. And we have had constant, consistent, and significant declines with her condition over the last six months that I have talked about in my previous episodes. Please feel free to go back. Really, I think it started probably in January to have a pretty consistent caregiving messaging because here's one thing I realized. When I got to the part where it felt like everything was falling apart and requiring so much more of me, I had luckily connected with a couple people on social media who truly helped me be prepared for what was gonna come in the future, even though I wasn't there yet, even though I didn't know when it would happen. And so as I was going through that transition, one of the things I realized is I need to talk more about my journey in caregiving. I need other people to know that they're not alone. Not everybody follows those same two people that I did. Maybe I can be a resource of hope, of confidence, of grace, and I can just see and hear people that are on this same journey that I am as they can do for me. And so I really shifted to doing a lot of that, talking about my caregiving journey and the importance of financial preparedness for caregiving, the importance of giving yourself grace, the importance of prioritizing yourself. I've talked on episodes before about the health journey I've been on the last year and a half because I lost sight of myself. I used to tell people, oh, I put myself on the back burner. Y'all, I wasn't even in the kitchen, let alone anywhere near a stove, okay? So I have had those moments along the way where I'm like, I can't just pick up and go anymore. I can't just decide on a whim that I wanna go out and meet somebody for lunch, buy a plane ticket, go wherever, whenever. Everything today takes planning, preparedness, coordinating schedules with other people, all of those kinds of things. And I was very much a person who would go, who was available, who was, hey, I'm gonna be there. Hey, I wanna go to this conference. Hey, I wanna go meet up with these friends. Hey, I wanna go home and visit my family, whatever. Those things have changed. And I have looked in the mirror many a time and thought, this is my reality now. But it doesn't have to be a negative thing, okay? But let's kinda talk about what that moment might look like. It's when you look around your house and it's filled with hospital equipment or you're rearranging rooms. My gosh, go back two or three weeks and listen to my episode about my mom shifting to bedbound. This is all a reality for me. Sleeping lightly, listening for movement. Listen, it went from that to me having bed alarm, chair alarms and a camera system because my mom had a fall. And I felt horrible, absolutely horrible because I felt like there was something I could do. And the truth is what I heard from doctors, nurses, my home health support team, everything was you cannot prevent everything. You can't prevent everything. And so I had to learn to give myself another level of grace in that moment, right? But here you are finding yourself every week organizing meds and supplies like a full-time operation. Y'all in my mom's room, I have a short dresser, not much bigger than a, maybe half again bigger than a nightstand that has certain supplies organized in it. My mom's clothes, the hand towels I use when I'm cleaning her up, doing different things to get her ready. And next to it, I have a bookshelf with five shelves that literally has, it has bandages on it. It has creams, it has briefs, it has bed pads, it has rubber gloves, it has body bathing towelettes and things like that. It has the catheter connectors for her pure wick. They are all staged. So when I walk in the morning to wake my mom up to get her ready for the day, I'm like, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. If you're just listening to this, you can't see me, but boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. Is me grabbing each of the things I need, laying them on the bedside table, similar to a hospital table that I got, right next to her bed, where I have everything at my fingertips and I can move through the process as comfortably as possible for my mom and myself. Okay, so that's my reality. That's what all of this I'm talking about is 100% my reality today. I mean, we spent thousands of dollars on equipment, things in the home to maintain her mobility as long as possible. And she was declining so quickly that some of those things we used once or twice. And now I have things stacked up in my back bedroom going, okay, I gotta figure out what to do with this stuff now. Because my dad's not at the point that he needs it. So do I store it somewhere or do I just turn around and sell it and maybe bless a family that needs things like that? I don't know, but we'll figure it out. Okay, at the end of the day, you don't realize how much of yourself has shifted until one day you can't remember the last time you did something just for you. It happens in such small steps and because you're experiencing it every day until it just adds up and adds up and piles up and piles up, you don't realize, I don't recognize myself anymore until one day you do, but you have changed so much. You don't even know where to start. You're overwhelmed. It might even set on depression or a new level of frustration in this responsibility that you took on or that you didn't have a choice in. There was nobody else to do it, which is another thing I hear a lot of the time. And you find yourself feeling guilty for wanting more, for wanting more rest, for wanting to be able to set personal goals. For wanting to be able to take time away, wanting to still achieve success in your job or your business. For just wanting more laughter or enjoyment out of life instead of the stress and heaviness or always being on call and responsive for your loved one. And that doesn't diminish how much you might love them. It's just a parallel reality. So it's important that we normalize missing your old life. It's okay. It's okay to say, I miss who I used to be. I miss what my life looks, used to look like. You should, if you built a life you were proud of and that you enjoyed. We need to normalize talking about wanting freedom, feeling resentment at times and feeling exhausted beyond work. And I will tell you since getting in the groups I have and connecting with other caregivers, even one-on-one outside of those groups or one-on-one through different accounts and social media, I search for people who share about caregiving, who support caregivers, companies, individuals, things like that, because I wanna be connected with people who understand my world, who are gonna give me answers to questions I don't even need to know, I don't even know that I need to ask yet, okay? All of that is a reality and all of it deserves to be talked about without shame. I'm not trying to embarrass my mom by sharing what I do about her and I'm not trying to, I'm not looking for, oh, you're doing such a great job. Oh my gosh, your parents are so lucky. No, I'm looking for a connection with other people that can understand me. Whether I share something that helps them or they share something that helps me and usually it's both things, right? I want so much for people to feel okay saying, I miss this, I want this, I dislike this part of caregiving. I am so tired and I don't know how to keep going because that is your reality. Stop hiding it. It's real and it's okay to be feeling all those things. But I wanna make sure you're taking the time to look at the opposite side of that. Contrast those things with the deep love that you are showing by doing the work you're doing, the purpose that you have in answering the call to care give, whether it was a choice or not. The gratitude of the time you still have or the moments of clarity you may get to share with a loved one, the sacred moments of being present for showing up for somebody who is declining. All of those things exist at once, almost on a daily basis for a lot of caregivers, almost on a daily basis for me. But because I take the time to look at both, when I feel like I might be getting stuck in a pit of missing, wanting, resentment, exhaustion, because I have actively focused on what can I be grateful for right now? What purpose have I found in doing the work I'm doing now and how absolutely much I love my mom and dad? It helps me navigate through that. It doesn't erase it, but it brings all of the things in at once and I can choose during a difficult day or a difficult moment to be grateful, to say my mom may be struggling or I may be struggling to feed my mom today because she's not cooperating with, but man, I know someday I'm gonna wish she was here so I could still feed her. Man, I really miss when I could have a conversation with my mom, but someday I'm gonna be missing her altogether. You can deeply love somebody and still grieve the life you had before caregiving. The caregiving road is both, this and simultaneously, good, bad, easy, hard, frustrating, joyful. It is both, this and this, almost all of the time. So let's talk about the unexpected strength that caregiving builds in us. Caregiving can create more resilience, patience. Ooh, Lord, has my patience grown in this process and it still needs to, for sure, but it can help develop perspective, emotional intelligence, leadership, advocacy skills. That's a huge one for me over the last few months, and appreciation for the small moments because they matter so much on the caregiving journey. If you look at, from a leadership perspective, how do you build leadership? Gosh, you're building something different than you used to. You're prioritizing being present over rushing through things. You're creating flexibility. You're able to adjust, right? Those are all leadership skills that in a job setting, oh my gosh, what I would have done when I was in the corporate world to have people who were willing to look at things different, who were willing to take their time and prioritize what they were working on, rather than just trying to rush through it, who were flexible in addressing the needs of customers or the company. And one of the other things is designing a life that supports your family. I do think in a lot of ways that there are opportunities to do that. Say if you're an employee in the corporate world at the right company. When you have a job, it requires certain things of you, whether it's hours, tasks, or whatever. And I would challenge you to say, okay, hopefully you have enough to control, here's when I'm on it, working here's where I'm not. And honestly, I know there are those jobs that don't because in the last couple of years of my career, my time is something I wanted back because I gave so much of it to the company. It was all I could do to squeak out my son's senior year to be at all the things I wanted and needed to be at for him, okay? So I know that that does exist. I'm not trying to say it doesn't and that you have all the flexibility in the world, but the ability for, I'll speak to me as a business owner, for me to design my business around my family is a game changer. And so even as an employee, with whatever limited time you have, take control of that piece and design everything else around your family instead of your family constantly around the other things. Even if it's a couple hours a day. But especially if you have the freedom to design your schedule, one thing caregiving has taught me or given me is a completely different look at the gratitude I have that I can do that, that I chose to build a business in an industry that can pay me well, that allows me to serve other people and allows me to prioritize my family. I may not be the same woman that I was before caregiving, but I am stronger, softer, wiser, and more intentional than I have ever been. You know, approximately 53 million Americans provide unpaid caregiving support and women provide the majority of those caregiving hours. The reality is caregiver burnout significantly impacts mental, emotional, and financial health. So as you're going through this process, those right there, mental, emotional, and financial health are the top three areas that you need to make sure you have support and structure around for yourself as a caregiver. It's not going to eliminate the heart. It's not going to eliminate the fact that you feel burnout sometimes. It's not gonna eliminate that I miss my old life or I wish I could. It's not gonna eliminate it, but it's gonna keep you in a healthier place as you navigate caring for somebody that you love. Here's my hot take for this week, y'all. Caregivers are some of the strongest people on this planet, but strength does not mean disappearing. It does not mean shoving yourself in the corner to focus on everything else. The reality is the more you focus on yourself and keeping yourself in a healthy and happy place, the even better ability you have, I'm not sure if that was a properly structured sentence, but an even greater ability you have to navigate through everything, to minimize the extent or the extreme nature of your frustration, to still find moments of joy and peace and blessings within your caregiving journey. But the reality is you are allowed to still have dreams. You're allowed to still build wealth. You're allowed to still pursue your career. You're allowed to still become more, that looks like for you. Your caregiving role is part of your identity, but it should not replace your identity completely. And honestly, the world would be better if caregivers stopped feeling guilty for needing support too. I would be lost without the support structure that I have around me as a caregiver. I would be absolutely lost. To be honest with you, there are some areas I've thought about adding some counseling or a support group just to have that lift in another way, not because I'm depressed, I'm not. But I know that things are heavier and harder to carry a lot of the time. And so having some place that I could release that and not fill the guilt because the people I'm working with understand or are walking the same journey, game changer. And I think that's something that throughout 2026 here, I'm gonna figure out where's the next best thing I can add for me to unload some of the heavy and the hard. So I have even more ability to focus on the gratitude and the blessing of this process. I hope that something I shared today resonated with you. I'm going to continue to talk about this topic and every other topic I've already covered and so many more I haven't yet every single week on chat with Nat, because these truly are the conversations that count in the caregiving world. That's my reality, that's my life. I understand it, I speak it. And my prayer for every person listening to this is that what I share every single week somehow lifts you just a little bit in your own journey. If you know somebody who could benefit from this episode, please share it with them. I would love for my messaging to reach more people and to support more people and to help caregivers feel seen and understood even if I may not have the ultimate answer for them. If you're realizing how important flexibility, financial preparation and support systems really are, please reach out to me so we can have a conversation. I'd love to be a part of helping you framework those areas for yourself and your family, because the reality is life can change fast. The goal isn't just surviving hard seasons, building a life that can hold them and finding ways to thrive along the way. I wanna thank you guys for joining me for another episode of Chat with Nat, conversations that count. And until next time, take care of your people, but don't forget to take care of yourself too. We'll see you again next week.