With everything happening in the world, I’d almost forgotten something: I still love humans. I get angry watching people defend and exhibit cruelty toward women, immigrants, religious groups, older people, poor people, my non-alabaster brothers and sisters. And I still find myself wanting to talk to strangers, hear their stories, and connect. Living, working, and being in community with different people has given me more to draw from when choosing who gets close. I notice more how people treat others. Attraction has changed too. Energy, respect, and safety have become incredibly sexy. Though I still appreciate good hands and a nice back. 😉 My girls and I share a 3/5 Human Design profile, and I see that lived-experience learning in all of us. We get out there, try things, meet people, and share what we learn. Each experience helps us recognize the people whose values fit our own. I can love humans and be selective about who gets close. These days, discernment helps me stay open to connections I actually want. What helps you recognize your people and how are you in community with them?

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.