"I'M ACTUALLY AT CAPACITY"

But how can I help?

Once, in the summer of 2020, I walked outside my front door and stood on the front lawn trying to breathe, barefoot and thirty feet away from the demands inside my house. The mob of people back there, four small bodies (and one exceptionally large one), were loud, their needs relentless. I leaned over with my hands on my knees, the way people do after a long sprint, hoping the passing cars wouldn’t slow down to stare.

I wasn’t having a panic attack, but it was a weird moment, like my brain was shorting out, sparks flying. I was 35 or 36, and nothing like that had ever happened to me.

I took this photo in the summer of 2020. Maybe I had escaped again to the front yard? They always find you.

I think it was the beginning of burning out. I don’t like the word “burnout” because it feels therapy-ish, which I know turns a lot of people off. (I do like “therapy words”—they are helpful to me—but they are also so distorted in pop culture (lacking nuance) that they’re often useless or harmful. I think they have to be handled with care.)

But I also know, whatever language they do or do not use, this burnout feeling is familiar to people: the too-muchness of recent years. Too much news, too much stuff, too much to do, too much to hold.

This “shorting out” thing still happens to me occasionally. Like I’m looking around my house to figure out where the noise is coming from, only to realize it’s inside my head.

My children are the best thing that ever happened to me. Ever. I think they are magical.

Still, sometimes I want to step outside of this constant “community” I’ve built inside my home, shaking people loose like a wet dog just out of a bathtub. Community is inherently so demanding.

Yet it’s that very community—the one that sometimes sends me jogging into the yard, front door wide open—that saves me from myself. Inside community (a family, a workplace, a group of friends), I don’t get to think I’m always right. I don’t get to feel prideful or smug or apathetic. Someone (usually eagerly) does the equivalent of clapping in my face: You. Have. Not. Figured. This. Out.

I recently read this piece by

rayne fisher-quann

called No Good Alone (Isolation is Easy, Living is Hard). It starts like this:

Somewhere between hyper-capitalist motivation videos, pseudo-spiritual tweets, and Instagram therapy infographics, a predominant mental-health narrative has emerged on the internet. It takes many forms but is perhaps best defined by its penchant for isolation: it begs you to “focus on yourself,” to “protect your peace,” to sever relationships that don’t serve you and invest your newfound time and energy into self-improvement. Seductively, it whispers that you “don’t owe anyone anything.” It glamourizes — and moralizes — a life spent alone. 

Fisher-Quann refers to text message templates like this one, meant to empower people to set emotional boundaries.

On the one hand, I get it. Boundaries are important.

On the other hand, I get a huge kick out of imagining saying this to someone with whom I share physical space. Like my children.

“I’m hungry!”

“Hmm. Do you have someone else you could reach out to?”

“I fell off my bike!”

“Do you have someone else you could reach out to?”

“Can you check my math sheet?”

“Do you have someone else you could reach out to?”

Real life relationships tend to be messier than Instagram/Twitter therapy allows. I feel so good about myself while scrolling quotes to affirm my positions, my sense of self. Everything changes, though, amongst people I can hear breathing and chewing and, in the case of my least-polite child, farting. There’s a distinction between my duty to people I’m sharing physical space with as opposed to people in my text messages or on the internet. I do have to choose what texts to respond to and when, and maybe “I’m at capacity” is a perfectly reasonable way to communicate. It’s the same reason I’ve ditched my smartphone, so who am I to judge the language of boundaries?

Plus, we are bombarded. It is impossible to watch a video of a Black man beaten in the streets and then spin around smiling to place a hot dinner on the table for my family. In this podcast, author Cole Arthur Riley (whose spirit—at least via podcast—is just the most calming, peaceful thing) talks about the energy extracted when we are “wrenched from one emotion to another” in online spaces. How to process rage and sadness over gun violence only seconds after feeling joy for a friend’s birth announcement? I don’t think we can process it. We (I) become so bombarded by virtual demands on our energy, we have nothing left for the bodies who share physical space with us: the ones we can smell and touch, the ones with dirt under their fingernails and flecks of apple peel in their teeth.

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I regret sounding so sanctimonious in recent posts, particularly this one. Perhaps you can’t sound sanctimonious without being sanctimonious, which I regret even more. I think I pump myself up with these kinds of aspirational posts, and they are, truly, what I believe.

But guess how long I can be sanctimonious in my own house? About nine seconds. About nine seconds before someone (my daughter) is whacking someone else across the arm and someone else (her twin brother) is screeching wildly about it and someone else (me) is gritting my teeth and suddenly pounding out raw chicken breasts with a zeal that causes pink bits of uncooked chicken to fly all the way across the counter to the toaster oven, where they stick like salmonella confetti. How much good would it do anyone, in that moment, for me to say out loud, “Children, how should we then live?”

Not much, I’m afraid.

My life is lists and noise and sweat and dirt. Did I mention noise?

The lofty thinking I do tends to evaporate the moment my four children pile into the back of my SUV, sweaty and tired and hungry after seven hours of school. Four days out of five, someone has already begun crying in the eight minutes it takes us to get from the school parking lot to our driveway.

Can you imagine—“I’m actually at my emotional capacity. Do you have someone else you could reach out to?”—as I worm my way out of the car pick-up line? As the long and difficult demands of the day on their little elementary-school bodies spill over into my car, a space in which they are finally freed from performing?

And this is just the way it works—the thinking, whether as shallow as an Instagram aphorism (“protect your peace”) or as deep as a poem about walking in the woods (like “The Peace of Wild Things”), tends not to hold up around the corporeal reality of other people.

The words just… fall apart.

For me, this is an important thing. If the words didn’t fall apart day after day after day, I would inhabit the words—not the world.

I would send the “boundaries” text message to a hurting person and think, “Yes, I have done the right thing! I have protected my peace!” I would not imagine the real body on the other end, likely struggling in ways to which I am oblivious.

Here’s more from

rayne fisher-quann

:

I can’t help but feel crushed by the weight of what I owe to my community, certain I’m going to hurt the people I’ve fooled into loving me, convinced that I’m doing them a favour by icing them out until I get my shit together. I am too loud, too self-involved, too insensitive, never caring enough or attentive enough or possessing enough natural kindness. I have made people I love feel alone when they needed me; I have been cruel to people I never wanted to hurt. Like many — dare I say, most — people in their early 20s, I find it hard to shake the feeling that my life is a pinball machine of relationships and opportunities that I’m hurtling through headfirst, knocking over bystanders and crashing into obstacles, unable to stop for long enough to figure out what I’m doing wrong. It is tempting, in this world of alarm-bells and flashing warning signs, to want to trap myself in a room where there’s nothing to bounce off of but myself. 

I recently read about something called dialetheism. My knowledge is only Wikipedia-level, but dialetheism is “the belief that there can be a true statement whose negation is also true.”¹

I don’t call it dialetheism (would you stay here if I did?); I usually call it paradox or tension. I think that’s what I’m most interested in writing about here; it’s certainly the thing I keep coming back to.

It’s important to set boundaries. (True!)

It’s important to live selflessly, giving others all they need. (True!)

But how? Neither statement gets to be true all the time. There is a third way, a way that’s harder to hold, especially as the raw chicken bits fly. Maybe it is something like, “Set boundaries, and when the need is great, let others trample them.” Or maybe it’s, “Like everything else, personal peace has both a value and a cost. Sometimes, the value is yours but the cost is paid by someone who needs you.”

Gosh that kind of thinking is exhausting. (Ha!—maybe that’s why I’m burned out.)

I used to think the higher calling was always to give, especially emotionally. I have a pretty high emotional capacity. But then, a couple years ago, I had an experience in which I realized first-hand the danger of not having boundaries (a situation very different from my regular-life front yard escape). It was devastating to acknowledge that I had limits, and that my failure to set boundaries cost not just me but my family. Plot twist! Martyrs aren’t heroes after all.

The (pseudo-) martyrdom had started after I fostered a child when I was 26. That was such a meaningful experience that I wanted to keep taking care of other people. I didn’t think there was a downside of caring for people for anyone except me, and I thought I could just keep paying the cost.

Until I really experienced it (not by degrees but in full force), I thought burnout was sort of a sacred state. Like a WWJD thing. And the ways we are complimented for sacrifice! Is there a more beautiful woman than a blank one onto whom we can project all our needs? Isn’t claiming burnout a little bit of a humble brag?

It takes a bit of age, I guess, to be burned by both the things you have done wrong and their opposites.

But I don’t know what I learned, really. I don’t know when the boundaries (“I’m at capacity”) are good and when I ought to yield instead (“Welcome”). Half the job is probably just being okay with my own mistakes.

Ideally the community set-up would be self-regenerating. Sometimes you are the person who gives a snack; sometimes you are the person who needs a snack. So yeah, that community has to be made up of some people over the age of 10.

Farmers Market excursion, also summer of 2020.

I don’t think the demands of my home would burn me out in the same way if I didn’t consume the news and the school emails and the voicemails and oh-my-gosh-stop-texting-me. I partially blame the onslaught of information—it’s a factor for sure—but I still think this isolation-community / renew-give problem is a perennial, human one.

Most folks in my age bracket (especially women, sorry) seem spread pretty thin. Some of them need to go shake loose their apron strings, stand on a rooftop, and scream I AM AT CAPACITY! I AM AT CAPACITY!

Yet those “I have no space” text templates are so cringey to me. Why?

Maybe because the alternative to having other people place demands on you is, as

rayne fisher-quann

says, trapping yourself in a room where’s there nothing to bounce off of except yourself.²

And maybe I say this because, as a person who lives in my head a lot, I know what happens when I “trap myself in a room” (literally or metaphorically). Usually I come out spewing meaning (like I do in this newsletter, accidentally, sometimes)—and then my husband says, “Okay, right, but don’t snap at me like that” or my kid says “CAN I HAVE A SNACK” or I have to fold a thousand pairs of polka-dotted underwear. And I remember that meaning can’t exist outside of physical things, outside of people. That the good stuff always happens at the intersection of two seemingly incompatible things.

To the front yard for a breath, back inside to fetch a band-aid.

To the front yard for a scream, back inside to clean up a spill.

Another photo I took in the summer of 2020.

It’s like a fancy way of saying—and this message is literally for me, not you:

Book a hotel room every six months, buy a bottle of a wine and a bag of jellybeans, binge-watch Love Is Blind, and for 48 hours refuse to pick your towels up off the floor.

Then don’t forget to go back home and answer all your text messages, perhaps with something slightly more generous than “Do you have someone else you could reach out to?”

Even (especially?) when that’s the thing you most want to say.

1. Dialetics, though, is sort of my modus operandi. It is the process of “pushing back and forth” between two ideas to get to the truth.

2. I read an awful lot of teachings by monks and other intentionally secluded spiritual leaders, but it’s not lost on me how their aloneness affects their teachings. Most of us could probably be very wise without the gritty interruptions of a life inside community.