I am usually the person who handles things.
Give me a problem, and my brain starts building a solution. Give me a system that is not working, and I want to understand why. Give me a child who has been misunderstood, a family that needs answers, an organization with a problem, or an idea everyone else thinks is impossible, and somewhere inside me a switch flips.
Okay. Let’s figure this out.
Recently, that switch didn’t flip.
My mother passed away unexpectedly.
There are parts of that story that are private and will remain private. Grief is complicated enough without believing we owe the world an explanation of our relationships with the people we lose.
But her death left my family with an enormous amount to navigate, both emotionally and practically. And somewhere in the middle of trying to manage everything that follows an unexpected death, I noticed something about myself.
I wasn’t sad in some neat, recognizable way.
I was spent.
Not sleepy. Not unmotivated. Not having a bad week.
My capacity was gone.
And for someone who has built a life around doing, solving, creating, leading, advocating, teaching, mothering, and figuring things out, that is an extraordinarily uncomfortable place to be.
It also made me think about the children and adults I have spent my career advocating for.
We Still Confuse Capacity With Character
We do this constantly in education.
A child completes a task yesterday but cannot complete it today.
But you did this yesterday.
A student understands the expectation but cannot initiate it.
You’re not trying.
A child holds it together at school and falls apart the moment they get home.
They were fine all day.
An adult who normally manages a hundred things suddenly cannot answer an email, make a decision, tolerate another conversation, or remember something that ordinarily would have been automatic.
What’s wrong with me?
Maybe nothing is “wrong.”
Maybe we are asking a character question about a capacity problem.
Knowing how to do something does not mean the nervous system has unlimited access to the resources required to do it.
That distinction matters enormously for neurodivergent learners, but I am becoming increasingly convinced that it is a distinction all human beings need to understand.
“Can” Is More Complicated Than We Think
We love consistency.
Schools love it. Workplaces love it. Parents understandably want it. I like it too.
If someone can perform a skill, we expect that skill to remain available.
But human beings aren’t machines with a fixed amount of processing power available every morning.
Sleep matters.
Stress matters.
Sensory input matters.
Emotional load matters.
Uncertainty matters.
Executive-function demands matter.
Grief certainly matters.
And sometimes the invisible demands consuming our resources are far greater than anything another person can see.
This is one reason I have spent so many years asking adults to look beyond behavior.
When a child appears oppositional, avoidant, distracted, unmotivated, or dysregulated, I want us to become curious before we become corrective.
What is this behavior telling us about capacity?
That question changes things.
Instead of asking, “How do I make this child comply?”
We might ask, “What is making this task inaccessible right now?”
Instead of, “Why won’t you?”
Perhaps, “What is getting in the way?”
Those aren’t softer questions.
They’re better diagnostic questions.
And better questions tend to produce better solutions.
Then I Had to Ask the Question of Myself
This is the irritating part of teaching something for years: eventually life makes you take your own class.
I know about regulation.
I teach people about nervous-system states. I talk about coherence, cognitive load, executive functioning, and the importance of creating environments where brains can access learning.
I know that pushing harder is not always the answer.
Knowing something intellectually and allowing it to apply to yourself, however, are two very different things.
My instinct is still to push.
There are people depending on me.
There are schools to run, organizations to lead, projects waiting, families to serve, ideas I want to build, and approximately seventeen thousand things my brain would normally like to investigate before breakfast.
And yet there are moments right now when my system simply says:
Enough.
I am learning to listen.
Not because I am giving up.
Because restoration is also productive.
Maybe Regulation Isn’t About Getting Back to Work
I think we sometimes misunderstand regulation, too.
We turn it into another productivity tool.
Breathe so you can focus.
Take a break so you can finish the assignment.
Regulate so you can return to work.
But perhaps regulation does not always need to earn its existence by making us productive again.
Sometimes the body needs safety simply because a human being deserves to feel safe.
Sometimes rest is not preparation for the next task.
Sometimes rest is the task.
That is something I want our teachers to understand.
I want our parents to understand it.
I want our children to grow up understanding it.
And, apparently, I needed to understand it a little more deeply myself.
Different Does Not Mean Less. Neither Does Depleted.
I have spent much of my career saying that neurodivergent people learn differently, not less.
Perhaps there is another sentence worth adding:
Having less capacity today does not make you less capable.
Those are not the same thing.
A struggling child has not suddenly lost their intelligence.
A dysregulated teenager has not lost their potential.
An overwhelmed parent has not become a bad parent.
A depleted teacher has not stopped caring about their students.
And a person accustomed to carrying an extraordinary amount does not become less powerful because, for a season, they cannot carry it all.
Capacity changes.
Human worth does not.
So this month, I don’t have a perfectly packaged lesson.
I have something better.
I have a lesson I am still living.
When behavior changes, get curious.
When capacity disappears, don’t immediately question character.
And when the nervous system finally says what the mouth has refused to say for far too long, perhaps we should listen.
Sometimes the most intelligent thing a human being can do is recognize:
I have reached my limit for today.
And let that be enough.
