The Most Important Thing Nobody Told You About Being Human

Balance is a lie, my therapist said.

What?!

Somehow in the next minute or two I was singing in “I want the world… I want the whole world!” from Willy Wonka to her. It was a day.

There she sat in her comfy little chair telling me I can, in fact, NOT do everything I want to do in this life. That I am human. That I will die before I am finished. That I can do only one thing at a time. That I have limits.

Rude.

I do want the whole world. I want to start each day with fresh bread breaking. Be present with my kids and grandson. Build a successful business. Travel. Catch up with my friends. Serve on the PTSO. Write another book. Or get the first one published. Enjoy my husband. Match all Tupperware to lids. Develop my physical fitness. Finally launch my knitting group, Tough Knitties. Create. Heal. Rest. And protect my nervous system.

And that’s the pared down list.

I used to think the problem was time. And self-disclipline. If I could just get up earlier. Stay up later. Cut something out. Optimize my schedule.

But the problem wasn’t time. It was capacity.

I never really understand what that word meant before I was a coach myself. Not in this context anyway. Capacity is what you actually have available to spend.

Physical energy.

Mental energy.

Emotional energy.

Attention.

Patience.

Decision-making

The ability to absorb one more thing.

The ability to handle a challenge.

The ability to recover when something goes sideways.

We wake up each day with some amount of capacity. Then we spend it.

The tricky part is, that you can have more of some kinds and less of others. Your body can be full of energy but your brain feels like mush. Or maybe you can think clearly but you have zero patience. You can be emotionally stable and out of decision making power. You can be fine answering emails and unable to make one phone call. Different accounts. Same bank.

Photo by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash

If you had asked me of course I always knew people had limits. Especially other people. Less so me. (Still not sure how that works.) But I also knew what God’s expectations were of me and that if I took on the challenges he offered, he would make up the rest. So, I had more and more babies, accepted jobs at church, and attempted the grand list of achievements that would make me a righteous woman in Zion. And I waited for the promised blessings. Knowing that even if they didn’t show up in this life my heavenly mansion was just becoming more glorious and beautiful. It must be basically a heavenly Mar-A-Lago because as of the day of my faith crisis, I was still waiting for that help to show up.

So when I hit a limit, I experienced it as a spiritual failure. More evidence of my inadequacy. I needed to be more organized, more disciplined, more grateful, more faithful. More something. It rarely occurred to me that I had simply run out of what I had for the day.

Capacity doesn’t negotiate. Trust me, I’ve tried. I have ignored it. Argued with it. Wished very hard that it worked differently for me specifically.

We all get the same twenty-four hours in a day. We can be in one place at a time. Can pay attention to one thing at a time. Can spend today’s capacity exactly once, and then it’s gone. And then tomorrow is a different account with its own balance. I know… so unfair.

Writing this article uses some of my capacity. Answering texts uses some. A hard conversation uses a lot. Grief spends a lot. Masking uses more than people realize.

Important note: Ability and capacity are not the same thing. And confusing them can lead to a whole heap of shame.

I know how to write. But I may not have the capacity to write today.

I love my kids. But I may not have the capacity to be patient after a day of constant interruption.

I can bake three dozen cookies. That doesn’t mean I have the capacity to do it this weekend.

I still have the ability but that doesn’t mean I have the resources available at this very moment.

Every yes to one thing is a no to something else. That’s just math:

If I spend Saturday helping a friend move, I’m not deep-cleaning my house.

If I pour all my energy into finishing a slide presentation, I don’t have much brain space for dinner conversation that night.

If I stay up until two with my husband who works nights, I’m not making a hot breakfast for the kids in the morning.

I used to consider all of these unrelated events that just happened to land on the same week. They’re not.

I grew up believing that if something mattered enough, you found a way. You stretched. You gave one more hour. Went the extra mile. Never turned down a calling. Said yes.

There’s some truth there. People do amazing things for short stretches. We stay up with newborns. We sit with dying parents. We pull all-nighters and answer emergencies and somehow keep functioning on fumes.

We can borrow from tomorrow.

But when tomorrow comes, the cost comes with it. The debt we borrowed must be paid.

Hard truth: Pushing past my limits has yet to increase what I have available. It just steals from the next day. And even the day after that. Until I’m running on a deficit. One I usually don’t even notice accumulating.

That’s what burnout actually is. It’s a slow shrinking of the capacity you’re working with. Week after week. Until there’s almost nothing left to give.

ADHD makes all of this harder to track. It doesn’t just drain the account faster. It messes with the data, so I can’t even tell what my balance is until it’s already at zero.

I’ll wake up feeling like I have enough capacity for six different things today. By the second one I’m spent. Then I assume I planned badly or didn’t try hard enough. Or I am adulting wrong again. Yet another thing everyone but me can seem to figure out.

Most days I just misjudged the balance. Again.

What I didn’t expect is that respecting my capacity hasn’t actually shrunk my life. It’s made it hold together better. Run smoother. Made me more consistent.

When I stop overdrawing the account every day, I stop crashing. I recover faster. I show up more myself. Because I’m not always rebuilding from empty.

I used to think accepting my limits meant giving up on what I wanted. It’s turned out to be almost the opposite.

This last weekend, an old friend and I reconnected. In the past, we’d have said we should get together sometime and never actually done it. This time I asked, “What about Saturday?” I drove an hour and a half with three of my kids to meet her at the Verde River, and we spent the day in the water. I had an open Saturday. Something I could never have dreamed of five years ago. It would have been filled with important things that don’t actually matter. None as important as this was.

That’s the whole world I actually wanted.

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If you already know what you need to do, and you’re still not doing it, it isn’t about trying harder.

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