Capacity is your ability to participate in a given situation. Everyone has a different capacity and it helps to acknowledge that.
I had no idea I would need to know how many billiard balls my toilet could flush when I ventured out into the world for a new one.
Life never ceases to surprise me with lessons. When I took this photo of a toilet at Home Depot, I did it for a laugh. I thought the marketing was hilarious and wanted to share with a friend. Why do I need a toilet to flush seven billiard balls? Is this what is happening in bathrooms across America? Y’all need to lay off the pizza and beer. I had literally never thought about the capacity of a toilet to hold and flush billiard balls, but now I know. The one down the line only flushed a bucket of golf balls. Was that better? I don’t know. The one I ended up buying did not make such bold claims but fit my needs.
A topic that keeps coming up in my life, and therapy sessions, is capacity. How much am I or someone else really capable of? It has come up consistently for the last year to six months of my life. I have needed to get real about what others are capable of in relationship with me. I had to get real about what I was capable of too. What was my capacity? What was the other person’s capacity? And then the hard part, was I willing to forgive that person for not being what I needed and move on without judgement and anger? Would I want to be released from a situation that I did not have the capacity for without judgement or anger?
So back to toilets, how do I know what I need? Billiard balls, golf balls, and how in the heck do I know what is better for me? Well my answer might be by trial and error through experience but that isn’t how the toilet buying process works. It is how life works though. You try things on. You experiment and you learn. I have come to a point in my life where I am grateful for all of my 43 years of life and the experiences that have taught me my capacity. I am eternally grateful for those who have been part of teaching me what other people are capable of by being in some type of relationship with me. I am also eternally grateful for all of the books, podcasts, mentors, recovery programs, therapists, and self-help books that have helped me learn about this topic.
When I was younger, I took someone’s inability to meet me as a rejection, a slight, a betrayal, or a personal attack. I thought people who did not meet my efforts were lazy and mean and I thought people who expected more of me were unreasonable and crazy. I have a standard of perfectionism for myself and I expected perfection from others. If anyone didn’t like it, we were going to fight, or I might declare you an enemy with a forever grudge about how you treated me. If you expected more of me than I had to give, even at my most perfectionist state, I took that as a message that I was not good enough and tucked that shame deep inside to eat my insides up later.
Almost always I thought it was my fault, either way. If I was failing, I better get better, grow quickly, heal, and become something or someone that could meet your needs and standards. If you were failing me, I was going to work on it for the both of us. I would lower my standards, curse myself for having such high standards, put myself and my needs lower and lower so that you could touch the bar, all the while dying inside. I was driving one day and heard T.D. Jakes on the radio. He is not someone I listen to but it was back in the day of XM radio with the Oprah station. He was on there talking about capacity. He is from Texas and was comparing people’s ability to love in terms of cowboy hats. He said that there were one gallon or regular hats, and ten gallon hats. He went on to say that if you are a ten gallon hat person who was in relationship with a one gallon hat person, you could not expect to be loved how you love. A one gallon hat person does not have to capacity to love beyond their one gallon. It isn’t their fault, it is just how they are made, they are one gallon people. It was your job to notice each person’s hat and to know what to expect. If you were a ten gallon hat lover, you needed to look for another ten gallon hat lover or accept the reality of a one gallon love without resentment. It wasn’t fair to punish someone only capable of one gallon love for not being a ten gallon love. And of course people can change and grow into new sizes of hats, but you have to know the truth of who you are dealing with.
I don’t know if I am always a ten gallon hat person but I do know that I have been growing hat sizes for seventeen years now and I know I am not a one gallon love person. I have been working on my capacity for many years and also life has carved me and forced me into capacities I never wanted but now benefit from. There is a saying that your capacity to feel joy is matched by your capacity to endure pain. I agree and I have not had a pain free life. There are things that have carved spaces in my heart and soul that broke me open to more pain than I thought I could survive. I did survive and I survive still. I have no choice but to stop and notice the sun on my face because there were years I spend in cold darkness. I have no choice but to gasp at a beautiful sunset or beauty because I have seen ugly, nasty, terrible things. I cannot pass a baby, dog or cute animal without pausing to bask in their innocence because I have missed out on innocence time and time again. My capacity runs deep because life has carved paths in my heart.
So much of my life has been spent exploring myself and my experiences. I do not run from experiences, I want to hold them up to see what they have to teach me. I want to grow and I want to understand the things I have not understood before. I want new glasses to see more deeply everytime my vision changes or I’m experiencing a different view. I thought that books could teach me and that therapists had the answers and they did, but I didn’t like the answer. I was my greatest teacher. I had the responsibility to choose learning, to choose love, and to grow. It was my responsibility to grow into my capacity. It was my job to be aware of when I was being a one gallon person and a ten gallon person. It was my job to be honest about how I felt in relationship with others, especially if I felt I was showing up in a ten gallon capacity and they were meeting me with one gallon. I spent years lying to myself. The first lie that I told and believed was that I was a one gallon lover (not talking sexual love here though sex is included in loving, not every relationship has that component to it). I thought that I had to do more, be more, give more or lie about what I was capable of. I was afraid of my capacity. I had been so hurt by loving so hard and so completely.
The second lie that I believed was that I could be satisfied with a one gallon love in all my relationships. That it was okay that I did not have ten gallon people in my life. That if I could add up all my one gallon relationships, it would be enough all together. It just didn’t work. I have a space in my soul that yearns for a deep, fulfilling ten gallon love. To be matched in my efforts, my capacity, my passion, my honesty, my empathy, my understanding, and my desire. I want nothing more than for someone to be able to travel down those well worn paths in my heart created by life and loss and pain, and for them to know how those paths feel because they have traveled their own for so long. I don’t need this person to be a romantic partner, just a fellow ten gallon lover. I just need to know that there are more of us. That we have each others backs and that we understand the depths of our capacity.
I’ve met a few ten gallon people on my journey. I am forever grateful for their presence in my life. I am at home in their presence and I feel deeply seen and heard by them. I feel filled up with their presence and their energy. There is something magical that happens when you feel safe and held by someone and they feel held by you. Energy flows, ideas flow, creativity blooms, and you both leave better than you were before you spent time together. I only wish there were more ten gallon people wandering around this world so that I wouldn’t feel so weird in the world.
The last thing thing that I have learned about capacity lately is that you cannot punish people for not having the capacity you wished they had. Iyanla Vanzant always says that you cannot tell people how to love you. You can only accept the love they are able to give and choose your level of participation in that love. Such wise words and so hard to do. I have spent many years of my life dragging unwilling participants through growth they didn’t want to experience. I have spent so much money on books I want people to read so that they can change and be more like me. I have spent so many years fishing for depth in shallow waters and cursing it all the time. I have carried resentments for years over feeling disappointed by people being who they are and doing what they do. I could not accept them for who they were or what they were capable of. I also couldn’t just walk away and not participate. I felt like I could create my own little army of ten gallon people by forcing all of my one gallon people to stretch and grow by force. It was incredibly painful for all of us. I can’t take it back or make it better but I can change going forward.
I can choose my level of participation in relationships with people based on our capacities. If I know that you are a one gallon person, I can have appropriate levels of interaction and I can stop expecting you to meet me in the ten gallon depths. I can be grateful to be able to participate in our relationship at a one gallon level or even in a ten to one gallon capacity without resentment that I may be giving more. I can only do this if I acknowledge some uncomfortable truths. That you cannot fulfill me in the way I seek to be fulfilled, but that you are worth being in relationship with at the appropriate level. When I need ten gallon love and ten gallon relationship I need to seek out my ten gallon people. If I don’t have any, then I need to meet myself there and give myself what I need. I hold out hope always that my life will continue to attract more ten gallon folks to meet me in the depths. The other spirit capable of meeting you in your depths in anything you consider a Higher Power. That spirit is so beyond ten gallons that you never have to guess if you will leave unmet or unfulfilled. I go there often to be met in the depths and to know that I am never alone, whether I am wearing a ten or one gallon hat, I am loved, accepted and never asked to be anything other than what I am.