I'm At Capacity!

5 minute read + 6 minute listen

I have a new phrase in my arsenal. A mantra, if you will. It’s a way of describing the load I carry and something which I, alone, can accurately diagnose. It’s like the big red button I get to press when everything I’m doing, and everything that is expected of me, becomes like a precarious house of cards I feel certain will crumble at any moment. It’s my saying; ‘I’m at capacity’.

If I were Oprah, this would be my ‘Ah ha!’ moment.

The thing about being at one’s capacity is that it is one hundred per cent subjective – and therefore nobody can really argue with it. You’re not saying your schedule is full or that you have no free time or that you are busy with this job and that. It simply asserts that you are full up, with zero scope to take on anything else. You can be full up emotionally, physically, practically – whatever you like. But being at capacity is a way of drawing a line at a tipping point. It’s a sanity call.

Before I rave on about my new favourite phrase (forgive my intense nerdyness around this topic), can we just have a moment for the ick-invoking habit we all have of comparing ourselves to others?

As a stay-at-home parent, who happens to squeeze in a little writing on the side, I often marvel at friends and acquaintances who appear to do so much more than me.

They may have an illustrious career, parent more children than I do, while keeping a cleaner house or have head-spinning energy for an enviable social life or raging sex life. I know that we each only have 24 hours in any given day, but some people annoyingly appear to do it all and do it all quite well. As the saying goes, ‘Comparison is the thief of joy’, which often means that we meet personal achievement with a; ‘Yeah, but she did that AND trained for a marathon’.

Well that, my friend, is when you pull out the ‘at capacity’ card. Like Amy Schumer’s now infamous quote about mothering – it goes something along the lines of; ‘Good for her, not for me’ – being ‘at capacity’ is immensely personal. Nobody else can call it for you. You can be sitting on your sofa in your pyjamas at 4.30pm, deep into re-runs of Keeping Up With The Kardashians on E!, and nobody has the right to decide that you should be able to go out for dinner, make them a snack or paint the spare room. If you can identify and name it when you’re maxed out, who can argue with you?

This can all be particularly helpful when you happen to live with human beings who may have different capacity levels to your own. I – fortunately or unfortunately, because it has it’s own set of pros and cons – happen to live with a super-productive person. My husband is a real do-er, complete with lists he actually manages to get through, and a vim and vigour for tasks that, frankly, leaves me exhausted thinking about it. I got to thinking recently about how I have no spare time – zero. Now, motherhood will do that to a person, but it’s more an issue of head space and scope to crack on with odd jobs of my own. While my husband fills his time and capacity levels right up with making progress and getting stuff done, I often find myself soaking up the childcare side of things (after all, I’m not ‘doing’ anything else, so why not mind the kids?). It goes without saying that if I have things I need to do or appointments to attend, we will organise it so that I can go ahead and do that. But this all becomes a vying for child-free time in which to ‘achieve stuff’. And this is where I can see that my emotional and mental load is different to his – it’s different to a lot of people’s in fact. I love, need and savour time to stare into space, to not be ‘productive’, and so oftentimes, seemingly doing nothing, in fact, has me at capacity.

Yes, the time I spend gently meandering around a field with the dog or sipping coffee could be put into training for a marathon, but it wouldn’t serve me. Capacity is about the ability to recognise when you’re at your own maximum load. And if you ask me, that can only be a revolutionary approach to us all taking better care and ownership over our own mental health and wellbeing.

The emotional load factor is immense – particularly for introverts and women who tend to juggle so much of the world’s emotional labour. Imagine if we all had that little white flag in our pocket we could raise to indicate to friends and family that no, I’m not busy, but I just can’t possibly take anything else on.

It would be a game-changer for us all.

Ultimately, our ability to recognise and articulate that we are at capacity is the height of kindness and gentleness. Our relationship with productivity is messed up. It can sometimes feel like we’re a burnt-out, frazzled generation that venerates being burnt-out and frazzled. Rest is something we schedule, like a treat, a favour to our frayed minds. Apps, more in tune with our phones than ourselves, (or, have we actually blended with and become our phones and them us?) allocate moments in the day for us to, ironically, be in the moment. Mindfulness is scheduled and called a ‘practise’, in case we should reduce it to being something that is not productive, because, not doing is bad, daydreaming is lazy, everything should be measurable and nothing done in vain, or out of a whim or because you fancy it…

I'm At Capacity!

5 minute read + 6 minute listen

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