Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should
On capability, energy leaking, and the thing I haven't figured out yet.
Picture this…Monday morning and I’m on the floor of my kitchen, in my pajamas, before 9am, using a hatchet because I couldn’t find my hammer. 😫
Last week I destroyed my garbage disposal with artichoke leaves. I didn’t know artichoke fibers do this thing where they wrap themselves around the mechanical shaft until they’ve completely seized it. I do now.
I spent the better part of Sunday trying to fix it → Allen wrench, wooden spoon handle in the reset hole, every method the internet had to offer. Me and ChatGPT worked through the whole diagnostic together. It was still a goner. Wouldn’t budge.
So I ordered a replacement on Amazon at some ungodly hour, it arrived in the wee hours of Monday morning, and I woke up determined. Had it hooked up before most people had finished their first coffee. Ran the disposal. Beautiful. Done.
Then I turned on the dishwasher. My dad taught me that any time you do anything with plumbing, you check all the connections after. Suddenly I had a new water feature in my kitchen that I had not planned for.
Back under the sink. More questions for ChatGPT. Turns out when you connect a garbage disposal to a dishwasher line, there’s a plug inside the mechanism that has to be physically knocked out. Like pushed out with blunt force. Hence the hatchet. Hence the pajamas. Hence the 8:47am timestamp on what was shaping up to be a very full morning.
I got it sorted. The kitchen is dry. Everything is working.
Well, everything is working with my garbage disposal…
There is a specific kind of aloneness that comes with being a single woman who owns her home, where the audio help is available (thankful for my Dad being a phone call away) and the physical help isn’t. Where there’s no one to hand the hatchet to. Where every single thing that breaks lands in the same pile, and that pile has one name on it.
I’m the capable friend. I’m the one people call when something needs figuring out. And I’ve realized that being that person comes with a tax that nobody talks about: when you’re the capable one, people stop checking if you’re okay. They assume you’ve got it. And after a while, you start assuming the same thing about yourself.
You stop asking for help not because you don’t need it, but because needing it starts to feel like a betrayal of the thing everyone thinks you are.
My psychic development teacher told me something this week that landed harder than I expected. She said I’m an energy leaker → that my Cancer rising wires me to help, to give, to show up for people, and that I do it so naturally and so constantly that I’m often doing it at my own expense without even noticing. The drive to help isn’t something I choose in the moment. It’s just how I’m built. Which means the leak is always running.
I thought about that sitting on my kitchen floor, surrounded by towels, next to a dishwasher that had just flooded the room.
A literal leak. Because of course.
I don’t have this figured out.
I want to say that clearly before I go any further.
I’m still in it. The exhausting in-between of not knowing what to just do myself and what to hand to someone else. Not just at home. In my business too.
I could build my own Flodesk workflows. I have the technical fluency. Sixteen years in product and tech means I can figure out pretty much any tool you put in front of me. So the question of whether to outsource it becomes genuinely hard for me to answer because capability keeps getting in the way of clarity.
Can I do this? Yes. Should I? I genuinely don’t know.
And that uncertainty is its own kind of exhausting. Because when you can do everything, nothing has a natural home. Nothing obviously belongs to someone else. Every decision about where your energy goes has to be made consciously, from scratch, every time.
There’s no one looking over your shoulder noticing you’re stretched. There’s no system that catches it. There’s just you, adding one more thing to the pile, because you can, and because no one assumed you couldn’t, and because somewhere along the way you stopped assuming it too.
Capable people don’t get handed permission to stop.
I think about the women I work with and I see this pattern everywhere. The founder who built the whole tech stack herself because she came from engineering and it felt irresponsible to pay someone else. The one who does her own books because she understands numbers and hiring a bookkeeper feels like admitting she’s overwhelmed. The one who answers every client email personally because she’s good at communication and she hasn’t found a way to let that go without feeling like she’s losing something.
Capable people don’t get handed permission to stop. They have to take it.
And I’m not sure I know how to do that yet. Not fully. Not without the voice that says but you could just do it yourself getting loud in the background.
What I do know is this: the hatchet didn’t feel like competence that morning. It felt like evidence of something I haven’t solved yet. The gap between what I’m able to carry and what I should be carrying alone.
I’m still figuring out where that line is.
