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The CEO Who Doesn’t Get Paid: Emotional Labor in…
The glow of the laptop screen felt toxic at 11:35 PM. I had pushed the deadline again, chasing the feeling that if I just checked the medication refill schedule one more time, maybe, just maybe, I could sleep.
– The Administrator
The Curse of Competence
My siblings think I’m controlling. They genuinely do. And every time they use that word-controlling-it feels like a punch in the gut, a deep, unfair twist of the knife. They see the color-coded spreadsheets, the weekly budget review showing the $575 discrepancy I caught in the power of attorney paperwork, the detailed rotation schedule for grocery drop-offs. They interpret precision as obsession, and they mistake management for micromanagement.
What they don’t see is the five hours I spent two weeks ago trying to find a specialist who took Mom’s particular flavor of supplemental insurance. They don’t see the 45 text messages exchanged with the primary care nurse about the dosage adjustment, or the 25 minutes I spent on the phone calming Mom down after she’d forgotten the dishwasher detergent again and convinced herself she was losing her mind entirely. They only show up for the performance review, never the development cycle. And in the theater of familial care, I am always the designated, exhausted CEO.









