You are the one everyone leans on. Nobody is leaning back.In his early twenties, Saviel Dante was sending home almost everything he earned. His mother was dying of cancer in a house where he and his brother did the work of nurses, because a hospital was out of reach. His father was still asking for money. He had a cum laude engineering degree, an international title, and a good salary, and in the worst months he kept five percent of it.Nothing written about the sandwich generation described that. Those books assume you are forty-five, with a career and a house, absorbing one new weight. They do not describe being handed the weight before you have built anything at all.Sandwiched is the book he needed at twenty-two and could not find.It is two things at once. A memoir that does not flinch: poverty measured in single eggs and government rice, a childhood that ended without anyone marking the occasion, a father who took more than he gave, and the particular exhaustion of being the reliable one. And a field guide, built the way an engineer builds, with every factual claim checked against real research and cited at the back.Inside you will find: The one question that tells you what to fund and what to capA three-part boundary you can actually say out loud under pressureWhy "just set boundaries" fails, and what works insteadAn order for allocating your income that protects you first, not lastWord-for-word scripts for the conversations that never go wellHow to measure a year that was about survival rather than growthWritten from Indonesia, for anyone holding up a family before they got the chance to build a life of their own.If you are the strong one, and you are tired, start here.
