Every week, Sheila and I try to have a Friday night date. We don’t see each other much during the week, and that’s our opportunity to catch up. During our conversation last week, she introduced me to the concept of emotional labor.
One of the benefits to being married so someone smarter than me - I’m always learning :-)
I’d never heard the term before, but she described it as the “thought labor” that goes in to making sure that things get done: that kids get to and from sporting events, that the house gets cleaned, that a broken washer gets fixed - etc. etc.
The concept isn’t one that I’d given much thought to (see what I did there?), but as I open my eyes to the idea, I see how much time and energy that kind of labor takes up in our lives. We might carry different versions of it, but her point was well-taken:
It’s very real labor.
No, it’s not physical labor. But it’s still work. And the work is still taxing and draining and takes a toll on us.
That labor takes up space, and I’m not sure that many of us give much credence or even recognize the thought work we are putting in to our day to day lives.
We have a family friend who recently retired from her job as a therapist - and when I asked her what the best part of retirement was, she said that she missed her patients, but she didn’t miss the constant worry.
“Someone was always struggling,” she said. “And I didn’t realize how much worry I carried with me during my off hours until I fully retired.”
No, that’s not quite the same kind of labor as managing a household, but I do think that’s part of the weight you might carry in various places in your life. Maybe it’s as a parent - maybe it’s as a caregiver - maybe the weight is the way you interact with the world when you are a very high empath (or a highly sensitive person).
Either way, I think it’s so importance to give credence and space to emotional labor and appreciate it for what it is - work.
Sometimes we get to the end of a day or a week and we wonder why we feel so tired and so run down. Then we start ticking off the things we “did” on our fingers. We “only” worked out one time, we “only” worked 35 hours, blah blah blah. (Also, we’re judging ourselves and our permission to feel fatigued by what we have crossed off on a list.)
So take a moment today and try to appreciate the emotional labor that you are putting in to your life, your health, your family, your work, your personal development, and sit in the understanding that you are working hard. Maybe even harder than you realized.