Last week I wrote about the difference between capability and capacity. About how being capable of doing something doesn’t necessarily mean we have the capacity to do it right now. But this week, I’ve been thinking about capacity on a much bigger scale. It feels like so many of us are collectively saying the same thing right now: I cannot take ONE MORE FUCKING THING. It’s not necessarily one thing that’s pushed us there. It’s the accumulation. The cost of living. Work. Family. Politics. Greed and ego. The constant stream of information coming at us. Another thing to be angry about, afraid of, or pay attention to every day. There’s a level of exhaustion that’s palpable. Last week, watching women respond to the allegations coming out of Cornell, I felt something underneath the outrage that caught my attention. Women were recognizing themselves in another woman’s story. “I’m Jane Doe” started showing up everywhere. Women were sharing their own experiences and standing up for someone they had never met. And men are showing up too. Men who are angry and asking why no one stepped in, why no one said something, and why preventing violence against women continues to be treated primarily as a women’s responsibility. In the middle of something horrific, it reminded me of something important: we were never meant to carry all of this alone. We lived in tribes before modern civilization for a reason: Survival. Part of managing our individual capacity has to be discernment about what we allow in. We can’t consume every piece of information, respond to every crisis, solve every problem or personally carry everything happening in the world. But discernment isn’t only about WHAT we allow into our lives. It’s also about WHO we allow around us, because the people around us can either consume our capacity or help create more of it. We’ve all experienced relationships that’ve required us to brace, explain, defend, shrink or constantly monitor ourselves. Those relationships take energy, even when nothing obvious is happening and the strain’s just running in the background.

There’s nothing to figure out. Just notice what this question stirs in you, see where it leads and if you feel drawn to, share what comes up for you. 💜 I'll go first... When I'm dancing, coaching, adventuring, deep conversations, discovering, uncovering and making sense of things by seeing how they relate to one another. Full stop. I feel totally connected and aligned.

For a long time, I thought being capable of doing something meant I should be able to do it. If I knew how to do it, had done it before, had the skills or could physically accomplish it, then I should be able to do it now. The last two years have taught me that capability and capacity are two very different things. My nervous system taught me that the hard way. I’ve spent most of my life carrying more stress than my body was designed to continually handle. I was functioning. I was working. I was figuring things out. I was being resilient because that’s what I do. But during the 2024 election, I could feel something changing in me. Stay with me through this next part, because the politics aren’t the point. What was happening inside my body is. I had lived through the first Trump presidency and COVID and everything that came with those years. This time I was watching what he was saying before the election. I was watching what was being planned. Project 2025 had been published. I was listening to the things he was saying and what he planned to do if he returned to office. And I kept telling people that I thought we were watching the dismantling of our government as we knew it being laid out in front of us. People told me I was being dramatic. I was overthinking it. It wasn’t going to happen. Then I woke up around 3:00 in the morning after the election and saw that he’d won, and before I was even fully awake, the first words out of my mouth were, “That’s not the truth.” That’s what came out of me in that moment. I can’t prove that the election was stolen. What matters is that my nervous system had already spent months watching for danger, and when I woke up that morning, my body believed the danger had arrived. Then I watched what began happening before he even took office. My body had been bracing for something I believed was coming, and now it was here. Something in me simply couldn’t do it anymore. Within 2 weeks of the election, my nervous system shut down.

There’s nothing to figure out. Just notice what this question stirs in you, see where it leads and if you feel drawn to, share what comes up for you. 💜 I'll go first: For so many years, I've judged my Mom and her emotional distance and even some trauma that she created in me. But after these last couple of months going the ego and identity deaths that I have, I've been able to forgive her for her inability to do any more than she did. She didn't have the awareness or tools that I've had. She didn't have the support to do the work. She didn't have the space. AND...she played her part beautifully to help me learn about these things in myself. So now I have empathy, and new level of love and compassion for her. Yes, those things happened. And I'm grateful in the sense that they led me here. She had the courage and love enough to play her part for both of us in this lifetime.

I’ve watched Off Campus more times than I care to admit. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I don’t really care who knows it. I’m obsessed with this movie. I’ve watched the whole thing more than once and gone back to certain scenes more times than I can count. IYKYK 😏 At first, I thought it was because the movie had awakened something in me that I had put away a very long time ago. And it did. But the more I’ve watched it, the more I’ve realized there’s something else happening. I don’t want to be 20 again. But at 66, I keep finding pieces of my own life in it. And apparently a lot of other midlife women are seeing themselves in it too! It’s not just in Hannah. It’s in Garrett. In Allie. In their relationships. In the things that don’t go according to plan. In being terrified and moving forward anyway. In the yearning for a life that feels bigger and more alive than the one they’ve been living. There are pieces of my story scattered all over this movie. One of the parallels for me is Garrett’s mom’s experience with abuse. My circumstances were different, but I know what it is like to be in an abusive relationship and not simply walk away the first time something happens. I’ve had black eyes. I’ve been choked. I’ve had broken bones. I’ve been thrown around and my head cracked open. From the outside, it can seem so obvious. Why would someone stay after that? Why wouldn’t she just leave? From the inside, it isn’t always that simple. Fear is involved. So is the hope that when they apologize and promise they won’t do it again, they mean it. Love and shame can be involved. Your sense of what is normal can shift so gradually that you don’t always recognize how far things have gone. Sometimes you are trying to survive inside the situation long before you are ready or able to leave it. I also recognize in Hannah the woman working and going to school because there is shit that needs to get done and no one else is going to magically appear and do it for her. I’ve lived versions of that too. I worked while raising two daughters by myself. At one point, I was working during the day and attending Landmark, an intense self-development program, at night, or doing speaking engagements after work. I did it with little or no co-parent or child support.