Exhaustion as a Capacity Signal

Here’s what happened when I tried to follow the “gold standard” medical plan, created by my specialist who didn’t take into account the fact that I was a whole person and not just a set of symptoms: I crashed, and I crashed hard.

I didn’t have the ability to add more to my plate, and when things inevitably crashed I felt like a failure. From what I’ve heard, I’m not alone in that feeling.

My exhaustion from trying to keep up and doing all of the right things didn’t actually mean I was doing anything wrong. I just thought it did. I thought that everybody else was able to possess some superhuman ability to navigate and get their life under control and my inability to do so pointed to some character flaw.

Here me when I say this: your inability to just push through isn’t a character flaw.

That exhaustion I had was actually signalling something deeper. I didn’t have a commitment issue, I had a capacity issue. Or, to phrase it differently, I was trying to pour more into a cup that was already full, and then I felt like a failure when the cup overflowed. Now you could look at that and say I was failing at pouring more into the cup (which I technically was), or I could have just gotten a bigger cup.

This isn’t your doorway to pushing yourself to the brink and getting more done. If you just reach for a bigger cup so you can do more, and do it “right” you will fail. Because you’re not actually changing the cup. Changing the cup involves changing how you do everything. (Is this cup metaphor making sense to anybody but me?)

If all I’d done was try to fix my cup so that I could add more, I still would have been in the energy of failure because bodies are not machines. They aren’t meant to be extracted from but in relationship with, and the energy of extraction was the very thing taking me away from the embodiment my body was asking for. My exhaustion, and my feeling of being a failure, was actually pointing me towards what needed to shift in my life. I also never would have heard it if I’d only listened to the dominant narrative.

In humans, exhaustion is usually one of the first signs that we’ve approached the edge of too much. And the capitalistic hustle culture we live in can easily frame this as a problem to be solved (we need to hold more liquid) than a communication effort (this is my sign I can’t put anything else in my container).

I didn’t know that, and the team taking care of me didn’t pay attention to that fact. Care plans fail when they aren’t patient specific. Care plans fail when they refuse to account for humanity. It was never me that failed.

So what changed? When I think back to that initial energy shift, and how I got from exhausted and failing to alive and embodied, a few things stand out. And that’s where we’re going next…