Do I have capacity for that?
I've been an overflowing, leaking cup for years. So why am I suddenly finding it so difficult to take on extra tasks?
“Do you have the capacity to take this on?”
The question is innocuous enough. I get asked it all the time, in relation to workload, voluntary load, social/activity load.
I used to have an automatic response to questions like this one: my rule, ingrained after years of the freelance feast-or-famine mentality, was to always say “yes.”
I could always make it work. I needed the cash, I reasoned. Or: I’d never regret going on that one extra school trip with the kids, or picking up an additional child from school to help someone else out.
Saying “yes” automatically always made sense to me because somehow, no matter how depleted I was, I’d manage to find the headspace and energy to get the job done.
Sure, it might lead to things falling apart down the line. Illness. Poor organisation. Total overwhelm. An argument (or several) with my husband, who often had a point: why on earth was I running around Rome in 2008 looking for an internet cafe to finish up a news post article… when we only had a weekend to embrace travelling, endless plates of pasta, each other? (See: The White Lotus season 1 Alexandra Daddario character, trying to write for websites on her honeymoon, for reference.)
The mentality of always being able to take on “one more thing” was a huge part of my identity. I relished being someone who might be crumbling internally but functioning outwardly. So what if I was already at breaking point, on holiday, or if my mental health was behaving so erratically that I could barely get dressed and make small talk at the school gate? All that mattered was that I always, always, had the capacity for more.
But I can’t do it anymore. I still want to a lot of the time — who am I if not a workhorse, plate spinner and endless “yes” person? — but even when my mouth refuses to form the syllable “No,” my body and mind are rebelling against the idea.
I no longer have the capacity. What’s more, I cannot even pretend to have it.
Case in point: they say the body keeps the score… and tells the story.
I started last week full of possibility and hope. I’d write for work. I’d write for fun. I’d pitch articles that I’d probably not get responses back to, but I’d feel resilient and proud of myself for trying (instead of like a worthless loser reject). I’d volunteer. I’d learn Sanskrit and mantras for my yoga teacher training. And I’d do my asana practice and strength training and walk the thousands of steps my mind begs me to daily.
But on Tuesday morning, I tripped over an open dishwasher door, banged my left foot (crucially, one of the few body parts I felt no pain in previously), and my capacity to take on anything disappeared completely.
It was the least sexy and most embarrassingly middle-aged way to hurt myself. It also forced a pause when I really didn’t want one (Hello, foot, do you not realise my kids are about to be off of school for weeks? Why do this to me now?!)
I wasn’t even that worried about the misshapen, swelling, Jackson-Pollockesque bruising, or the prominent bump exploding above my left arch. I didn’t care that I was limping and, as one day slid into the next, in enough agony to swallow a co-codamol I had leftover from a cyst-removal/hysteroscopy last summer.
As I watched my foot mutate and ache, as the pain refused to abate and walking in shoes became more of a struggle, I kept telling myself my week would go on as promised.
I’d still go to the yoga studio the following day. I’d pitch and write and accomplish stuff. I’d cheer my children on at their matches.
But I didn’t have capacity for any of it. So I focused on the “keep the show on the road stuff” — aka my kids, and then, finally, getting my foot X-rayed because it was looking and feeling increasingly terrible. The week felt like a write-off, and not in a restorative way. Another version of me (who wasn’t in therapy and trying to speak to herself more gently and judge herself less harshly) would have called last week a “fail.”
But I’m trying to reframe that thinking. It was a pause. And pausing isn’t a bad thing. Being at capacity isn’t worse than being overloaded and overwhelmed.
I’m taking this energy through to this week. The foot is still not good, though I did manage to vaguely do my vinyasa practice twice, so my brain-body integration is in a better place.
But my capacity remains at single espresso levels, when I probably want to be a Venti Frappucino…
But I’m wondering if it’s not just the foot. Maybe I’m not a Venti Frappuccino overflowing person anymore.
Maybe it’s age. (43 next week!) Hormones. Having four school-age kids, which is its own magical time of parenting, endless discovery and laughter… but requires huge emotional capacity for the kids’ stuff alongside my own. I am no longer capable of negotiating multiple articles a day alongside spectating at a kids’ concert and mediating a sibling squabble, then parenting until 11:30pm or whenever my eldest decides she’ll go to bed. Or maybe I’m realising I didn’t get to have my 20s because I was consumed by grief and running from it… so I feel the need to slow myself down now. The luxury of allowing myself a 90-minute vinyasa krama instead of cramming in a 10-minute workout around articles and school drop-off feels like a beautiful treat to myself, and one that I didn’t have “capacity” for 18 months ago. But now it’s the thing that I schedule my life around.
Maybe my concept of ambition and success has shifted, and now “busynesss” isn’t as appealing as it once was.
Or perhaps, now that my mind is quietening, I can start to listen to what it’s telling me. And while I wouldn’t recommend accidentally flinging yourself over a home appliance as a way to do some much-needed soul searching in the middle of a busy summer week (shoutout to the amazing NHS fractures/joints clinic in Roehampton which gave me a same-day appointment, X-ray and result within 45 minutes; they were amazing), I think the foot, and my brain, are telling me to take a pause before I keep pouring.
And to learn to see free time as a possibility instead of a problem. Or to simply enjoy the much-needed pause.