Words by Smiley Team
When she was in her mid-20s, Kate Oliver, now 29 from London, came to the realisation that she was a carer for her mum, who suffers with severe depression and anxiety. At the time, she was navigating becoming a carer with balancing a career, relationships, friendships and the life a 20 something is ‘supposed' to have.
“I remember sitting one night and Googling ‘caring in your 20s’,” she tells Smiley News. “Every article was about skincare routines in your 20s and caring for your body.” After struggling to find appropriate support and feeling particularly isolated, she decided to set something up herself.
Kate created The Caring Collective – a network for young carers, like herself, who are looking for support. “My hope is that I can build out lots of little communities who can provide ad hoc advice and support to each other, and hopefully in future meet at real life events that allow us to talk about our shared experiences but in a more relaxed and less formal way,” she says.
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Kate lives in London with her partner, but she and her mum’s partner are all primary carers. She has spent years going back and forth to her mum’s house – which is four hours away – and even moved home in lockdown to be with her. She found herself in a situation where she didn’t class herself as a full-time carer, but also felt she was in an important space that needed to be acknowledged.
Having been caring for the past four years, she hit a point in 2020 where her mum had had six months of consistent crisis points. “It wasn’t sustainable,” she says. “I had no one to talk to about it, and no support.”
She found writing was a great way to help her deal with her emotions. She’d write through the night, but felt embarrassed to share her work publicly. What was coming across in her writing wasn’t just a diary entry, but reflections and learnings on what she’d been through.
“I wanted to do something that was helpful, so I set up the website at the beginning of this year,” she says. “This is something for me to find people in a similar situation and them to find me.”
“My hope is a community or network comes out of it - people who understand,” she says.
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Creating a network of like-minded people who understand what Kate is going through, where they can all offer each other support, has been an incredible thing. “It took me a while to get to this point,” says Kate. “I was a carer for years before I created this. But I thought if nobody else was going to do it, I should.”
Kate has already connected with people who are in similar situations and have supported each other on their journeys. The first event of the collective is being held in collaboration with The New Normal, a charity which creates respectful and compassionate spaces online and in person to discuss grief and bereavement.
The Caring Collective and The New Normal will come together to create this new space for young carers to share their experiences, or to simply hear from others who might have been through something similar.’
The event will be at 7.30pm, over Zoom, on 2 November. To find out more and sign up to the event, head to The New Normal Charity Instagram page.
If you, or someone you know, may be interested in The Caring Collective - check out Kate’s posts on the website and get in touch if you want to connect and share your own.
