From Care To Carer: The Moment I Realised My Life Had Changed — And Why I Built CarersInfo

By the founder of CarersInfo

If you’re reading this, something has shifted in your life. Maybe it happened slowly — a question you started asking yourself more often, a worry that sat quietly at the back of your mind and then, one day, wasn’t quiet anymore. Maybe you’ve only just started to use the word “carer” to describe yourself, and it still feels strange. Like it belongs to someone else.

I know that feeling. And I want you to know — you are not alone in it.

The pot on the stove

It started with a pot.

I noticed it had been left on the hob — not once, but several times. Each time, there was a perfectly reasonable explanation. He was distracted. He forgot. It happens to everyone.

But I kept noticing. And slowly, almost without realising it, I started to change my behaviour. I’d call more often. I’d pop round more. I began to stay a little longer, just to check. I’d look around the kitchen before I left.

I didn’t call myself a carer. I was just being a good daughter. I was already at home at the time, looking for work — so it was easy, at first, to tell myself I was simply nearby. Simply available. Simply helping out.

That’s how it begins for most of us. Not with a diagnosis, not with a formal declaration — but with a quiet internal shift. A pot on the stove. A door left unlocked. A repeated story that you smile through, because pointing it out feels unkind.

And gradually, without anyone handing you a rulebook or a map, you are in the middle of something enormous.

What I was carrying — and who I was carrying it alone

Here’s what I want to say to you that nobody said to me: the exhaustion isn’t just physical.

Yes, there are the practical things — the appointments, the medications, the phone calls, the decisions. Those are real and they take time and energy. But the exhaustion that hollows you out is something else. It’s the weight of being the only one who truly understands what is happening. It’s watching someone you love change, incrementally, and not being able to stop it. It’s smiling when people ask “how’s your dad?” because the honest answer would take too long and they probably couldn’t hold it.

Nobody around me quite understood what I was carrying. Not because they didn’t care — they did. But caring for a parent with dementia is an experience that is almost impossible to explain from the outside. You are grieving someone who is still alive. You are loving someone who is becoming someone different. You are frightened, and guilty, and sometimes — in the moments you’re most ashamed of — you are angry.

All of that is normal. All of that is human. And none of it makes you a bad carer or a bad person.

I know this now. I didn’t know it then. And when I eventually looked for help, what I found was almost nothing — because almost everything out there is written for the person being cared for. Not for the person doing the caring.

The one thing that was offered to me was counselling. I didn’t want it — though looking back, I’m not sure I even knew what I did want. I just knew that counselling didn’t feel like the answer. And even if it had been, the waiting list was around six weeks before I’d even be assessed to see if I’d be accepted. Six weeks of waiting, just to find out if help was available.

From care — to carer

There is something else about my story that I haven’t mentioned yet. Something that shaped everything.

Before I became a carer, I was cared for. I grew up in a children’s home.

I know what it means to need support from a system. I know what it feels like to be dependent on others, to have your daily life shaped by people and structures you didn’t choose. And I know — in a way that is very personal to me — how much it matters when that support is good. How much it costs when it isn’t.

So when I found myself becoming a carer, I knew one thing with absolute certainty: I was going to need help at some point. And I was going to need to know where to find it.

What I didn’t know was how hard that would be.

Six months. Nothing.

When my father passed away, I looked for support.

I looked for guidance on what I was supposed to do next. I looked for someone who understood the specific grief of losing a person with dementia — where the loss had already been happening for years, but the death still broke something open. I looked for resources for carers who were now no longer carers. People who had organised their entire lives around someone who was no longer there.

I looked for six months.

I found very little that spoke to me. Very little that acknowledged the full arc of what caring involves — not just the doing of it, but the before, and the after. The becoming, and the loss.

I am not telling you this to be bleak. I’m telling you because it is the reason CarersInfo exists.

Why I built this

I built CarersInfo because I needed it, and I couldn’t find it.

I built it for the person who is standing in a kitchen looking at a pot on the stove and not yet knowing what that moment means. For the exhausted daughter or son who is doing everything right and still feels like they’re failing. For the carer who has lost the person they were caring for and is trying to figure out who they are now.

I built it because no family carer should have to figure this out alone. And because the information, the guidance, and the sense that someone else has been here before you — those things matter. They matter enormously.

You deserve support. Not just the person you’re caring for. You.

If you’re just starting out

If you’ve found this page because you’re at the beginning of this journey — or because you suspect you might be becoming a carer and aren’t sure what to do next — start here:

Your first steps as a carer — everything you need right now →

CarersInfo was built for family carers — providing free, plain-English guides, checklists, and support at every stage of the caring journey.