Chapter 18 — The Value of Invisible Work

While Justin packed, I walked, slowly, through the house that was now mine, and I thought about all the years I had spent inside it as a person no one really saw.

There is a particular kind of invisibility that belongs to people who do the work that keeps other people’s lives running.

The housekeeper, the janitor, the nurse’s aide, the woman who cleans the office after everyone has gone home — we move through the world doing the essential, unglamorous, endless work that everyone depends on and almost no one sees, and we grow accustomed, over the years, to being looked through rather than at.

To most of the people who ever visited that mansion over eighteen years, I was not a person.

I was a function.