Structural Memory

A role can be anything: mother, daughter, friend, partner, colleague. As humans, we move through a series of roles depending on circumstance, proximity, and need.

Over time, roles accumulate rules. These rules are rarely explicit. They develop gradually, shaped by repetition, expectation, and what proved functional. As conditions change, the rules are meant to change with them.

As children grow, caregiving adapts to a new stage. When an employee leaves, the role continues, but the person does not. When a partnership ends, the roles they play in each other’s lives are relinquished — the responsibilities carried are meant to be redistributed elsewhere.

In theory, this transition is straightforward.

In practice, it often isn’t.

Roles do not dissipate upon the withdrawal of consent. They persist because they had a purpose.

Roles organise responsibility, distribute effort, and reduce uncertainty. When a role has functioned as a stabilising mechanism, the system will continue to lean on it — even after the occupant walks away.

The relationship ends.

The expectations do not.

When expectation becomes responsibility — when responsibility is no longer evenly distributed — imbalance forms.

One role expands. Another contracts. What appears neutral on the surface — reliability, competence, availability — becomes the conditioning for one person to absorb the system’s load.

This is how power imbalances form quietly. Not through authority, but through expectation.

Systems prefer continuity over recalibration. Responsibility follows the same groove, even when the conditions that necessitated the role have changed.

This is rarely deliberate.

It is habit.

Reclaiming responsibility requires effort, discomfort, and acknowledgement of imbalance. One person must take something back. The other must sit with the consequences of absence.

So instead, the role persists — through growing up, through rupture, through loss, and through moving on.

What changes is not the expectation, but the language around it. Responsibility is reframed as helpfulness. Reliance is softened into familiarity. Proximity becomes justification.

Nothing explicit is asked for.

There are no overt demands.

And yet, the labour continues to flow in the same direction.

This is why roles outlive consent. Not because people refuse to let go, but because systems resist releasing what once stabilised them — especially when the cost of regulation has been one-sided.

When the person absorbing the invisible labour withdraws consent, the person whose expectations were being met takes longer to catch up.

This is not emotional.

It is habit.

What follows has no bearing on character.

Where expectation remains intact, reliance remains unexamined. It does not present as dependency. It presents as familiarity, reasonableness, or care — particularly when change is heightened by rupture.

Intent may be neutral.

Impact is not.

Boundaries are crossed not through choice, but through lack of care. Responsibility quietly returns to the person who has already stepped away from the role. Every refusal carries a silent cost. Resistance to the breach is treated as hostility rather than correction.

Alternatively, the role is consciously dismantled.

Responsibility is returned. Regulation is internalised. Support is sought elsewhere. The role — now an absence — is treated as a gap to be addressed, not a puzzle missing its piece.

This process is not comfortable. It involves inefficiency, disorganisation, and loss of ease. But the result is clean.

The system adapts.

The difference is not intent.

It is whether the cost of discomfort is accepted — or passed along.