The Great Capacity Con
How do we “expand our capacity” without replicating systems of oppression that require us to extract from ourselves & eachother?
One of the major barriers I see for mothers & caregivers to get more involved in building alternatives to this racist patriarchal capitalist mess of a country is believing that we have no capacity to do so. (to be sure, the main barrier is the actual racist patriarchal capitalist mess of a culture that teaches us this version of “capacity”… but we’ll get there.)
We hear about a neighborhood training or a community gathering or a call to action, we look at our calendars and think of the chores & pick ups & meals, and respond “I don’t have capacity right now.”
And we don’t. I never said we’re lying.
There aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything on the calendar, everything on the schedule, everything that our family needs us to do. There aren’t enough hours in the day to keep the kids fed & clean & the pets too & WE ALSO HAVE JOBS & husband needs a few errands run, if we can just squeeze them in.
We don’t have capacity. We have no space to do anything more. There is no time in the day to do all of this and somehow fight fascism at the same time. And this is exactly the point. This is exactly where these billionaires & pedos-in-power want us to be.
Yet
capacity lives in our bodies in many different ways. We’re not a bunch of fragile vessels for filling & emptying. We’re not bound & colorful planners neatly organized. We’re not made up of 24 blocks, stuck together like magna-tiles, that can be rearranged many ways but only in 24 (hour) increments. But it sure feels like it.
One story I tell myself is: I will have more capacity if I can manage my time better.
Maybe I just need to wake up earlier each morning so I can do the things that feel important to me, like writing & exercise & protesting.
Maybe i need to stop wasting so much time scrolling/reading/showering/staring off into space while i eat the leftover crusts at the cutting board.
Maybe i need to prioritize my time differently. I really should invest in that planner with all the dots instead of lines. That looks like it might hold my attention.
Maybe I need to stop staying up so late watching tv (even though it’s the only time i get a quiet house) (if you don’t count the hamster wheel that starts up right when everyone else goes to bed).
All of these ideas make so much sense to me. I could be organizing my time differently to fit more things in. It’s hard to refute that I spend time zoning out in various ways, precious time that I could spend doing things for my community.
But wait.
Each of these things treats capacity—and time—as a finite resource. As something that requires management. As something that happens to this body, in this home, and nowhere else. Sure, time itself comes from outside this house—clocks & stock markets arrived before we did, after all—but it seems that when I look for solutions to this problem of never having enough time or capacity, i always look to changes I can make to my routine rather than looking at the larger web that my puny individual schedule is caught up in.
These days, capitalist clock time sure feels universal, as our bodies are trained to feel a certain way on Sunday nights versus Saturday mornings, as a familiar panic grips so many of us each evening as we stare at our babies and think of the long hours of lonely night ahead… and if the capitalist clock is universal & scarce at the same time, then it seems like the only answer to the conundrum of our lives is to shift things around, get a better-paying job, start a side hustle. Playing catch up, always. Paying off our debt, always, whether that’s the debt of hours spent learning in classrooms or the debt of citizenship or the debt of having a body that requires care or the debt of “unearned” privilege or the debt of the baby that cried in dad’s arms all through dinner. (How dare we eat while he suffered like that, overwhelmed in the face of his angry progeny. How dare we feel joy when our ancestors may have been members of the same type of slave patrols that we’re speaking out against today. How dare we sleep when we’re tired when this country demands we carry the burden of our lives.)
In this culture of debt, we will never have enough capacity to question the containers we live within, let alone to strategize outside of them. When we choose our actions based on the capacity of debt culture, we will always be undermining our own power.
We did not come into this world to earn privilege, just as we didn’t come into this world to wield privilege. But this con of capacity will keep us frantic & scrambling, which keeps us grasping at the only sites of power we think we have: whiteness, money, documents that prove our legibility. When we attempt to monetize or brand our activism, when we keep ourselves quiet for fear of angering people, when we divvy out our money based on hypothetical futures rather than to the people who are begging for care around you right now, we continue to live our capacity limited by clocks & credit scores—extractive, exacting, finite, earned, and ultimately, stuck in our myths of powerlessness.
Fascists love it when we continue to think of capacity as “low” or “high” based on our energy level (low energy is because you skipped the gym, we’re reminded), bank account (a responsible person saves for retirement, we’re told), and outlook (the glass is always half full, we chastise ourselves).
When we continue to think it is our responsibility to manage our own capacity, this management will nearly always involve buying more things or demanding care from others or giving up something we perceive as “just for us” (think: sleep, comfort, free time, friendship).
When we continue to think it is our responsibility to manage our own capacity, we will continue extracting from ourselves & eachother, which keeps us stuck in harmful cycles that harm everyone, not just ourselves.
This capacity con is keeping us all stuck and barreling toward full-on authoritarian control & climate collapse. This capacity con will prevent us from ever getting free.
Dayna Nuckolls makes this really clear for us in her latest podcast:
“Yeah, there is enough for everybody and you need to go get your enough from the people who are hoarding it. You need to take it back. You need to stop giving it to them… Balancing, giving, and receiving care is about a reorientation of your understanding and conceptualizing of what qualifies as care…
The propaganda is meant to make you feel like and believe that your capacity to have what you need is only limited by how hard you’re willing to work. And that is truly a lie. It’s a lie from the pit of hell. It’s absolutely a lie. Free yourself. Free yourself. Free yourself from taking responsibility for something that is not your responsibility.”
There are other shapes of our bodies, capacities that can be found beyond GoodMother, beyond our bank accounts, beyond our privilege. These shapes are more difficult, perhaps, to see because they don’t fit into the shapes of modern Man (shout out to Sylvia Wynter). But they’re there, and water in all its infinite flow can show us the way, can show us how to carry, how to “create the conditions to do the thing that most wants to emerge from us,” as Sonya Renee Taylor has called us to do.
If you look up the definition of capacity you’ll notice that there are many definitions. One of them is
power of receiving impressions, knowledge, etc.; mental ability. ie the capacity to learn calculus.
Ok, so capacity isn’t just about how much we can hold or whether or not we have enough left over to give to others. It’s also about how well we can receive. If we can receive what we need—which means both that it’s available to us, and we’re able to claim it—then there would be no need to extract from myself or from others in order to live.
We don’t want to fall into the trap of scarcity once again, so let’s assume (despite all we’re told by wealth hoarders) that everything we need is available to our receiving.
Arriving with the question, How do we “expand our capacity” without replicating systems of oppression that require us to extract from ourselves & eachother? i see now that maybe the more important question is: How can we enhance our power to receive?
Futures-to-come, communicating with us through all the bodies before & after in a radiating, rippling, diffracting, shifting current of exchange, of interchange, of intra-change… futures-to-come are asking us to expand the ways we receive.
We can look to Earth for the shapes that have received the overflow of times & cycles. We can look to the mothers who weave in constant reciprocity. We can look to our children & feel wonder at the inheritances we have accepted & they have received, both acknowledged & unacknowledged. We can find wormholes at the mouths of our elders & learn what it means to receive wisdom. We can look to oceans, the source of these tender bodies, to teach us about the ways capacity emerges through us.
Our bodies teach us so much about what capacity actually means, when we look to the waters that move through us. What are human bodies but tide pools of sweat & blood, milk & spit & tears?
☉ Blood teaches about capacity: Our circulatory system, like a tide pool, is healthiest when it is both clearly contained and open to movement. Edges are important, but they must still be permeable. Holding is important, but only to the extent that it allows flow & exchange. With circulation comes nourishment. With flow comes the ability to make necessary changes. I can honor my processes and also how they might change. I can guard my energy and also keep it open to flow.
꩜ Tears teach about capacity: I can feel the expansion of ritual attention, the way that grief compresses & opens at the same time. Capacity for emptiness is just as important as capacity for fullness. Holding emptiness when it’s called for is just as important as holding abundance. In fact, they are two sides of the same coin. We must practice both, with eachother, in ritual, because bodies together is where our capacity lies. Waves of emotion are potent conductors of agency & power, especially when collectively felt. Capacity lives in process & ritual; just as there’s no beginning or ending to our collective grief, there’s no beginning or ending to our capacity, either. What matters is how we’re changed along the way.
∞Milk teaches about capacity: We are not closed systems. Capacity isn’t a one-size-fits-all thing. Capacity is a process of relating to the world. Pain & pleasure are information. Fullness & emptiness are information. For there to be abundance, receiving is as important as giving. We are not limited by how much we can hold; rather, understanding our own “holding capacity” is important for understanding our own timing. We undermine ourselves when we insist on following capitalist timelines instead of our own rhythms.
∿Sweat teaches about capacity: We are not fragile beings. We are anti-fragile & ecosystemic organisms that know how to respond to what is needed. Inflammation is information about our capacity; increased inflammation decreases our capacity. Through friction & flow, we expand capacity. Through friction & flow, we ripen eachother.
⚯Spit teaches about capacity: We must examine the stories we use to keep ourselves small. When we metabolize what is no longer needed, instead of hoarding it for some future date, we find we have greater capacity to do what is needed today. Doing hard things helps us learn our edges—capacity isn’t only about containment, but about expansion & connection.
The reality of our lives is much bigger, much deeper, much wider than 24 hours or 7 days or 12 months or whatever timed boxes we’re focused on when we’re trying to figure out how much capacity we’ve got to spare.
To hold bodies as known vessels, to protect and preserve our capacity for the sake of embodying a stable identity, makes as much sense as telling water to only fall as rain or to stay static in a tide pool. That is, it makes sense for capitalism’s eternal growth & extractive status quo, but it does not make sense for us as the everchanging ecosystem bodies that we are.
I sense the hugeness of futures, the neverendingness of futures, the big-bodied abundance of these futures-to-come. I’ve seen how deep we are, how abundant time can be when our bodies are together. I’ve heard the resonances passed from body to body, the slowing down simmer of ahhhhhhh. I’ve smelled futures-to-come in the kitchens we cook in together, passing babies & crafting nourishment out of whatever is about to go bad. I’ve felt the grief for the many, many times that have been stolen from us, from all of us reaching out toward eachother & knowing that closeness is what matters, more than the goal, more than the eternal growth of gods & stocks.
We are bodies of time. Made of the stardust of distant pasts and carrying our grandbabies already in our bodies.
May we we reclaim time from extractive norms of capitalism, for the sake of liberation for all.
May we release our hold on time as a thing to keep up with & manage.
May we remember how to move time through our bodies before we lose it forever.
May we practice receiving as a tide pool receives, in constant exchange & emergence.
May we honor our watery bodies of memory and their infinite capacities.
Tide moves out: How do I tend the fire in the cave? or- How do I find the cave? How do I light the fire? Tide moves in: the festering spots the deep unanswerable questions the things that make my heart race the all all of of me you the juicy meatiness of this body the bones the rocking the deep in the throat thickening the tethers the whispers that arrive in the quiet the spaces that can only be felt in the slowness Tide moves out: what happens when we break? what happens when we come together? what happens when we settle into the brokenness, instead of striving for wholeness? how can I feel my body as an ocean? Tide moves in: the We, expansive, full of births and deaths. a human with spectra [the diffracted Human] : tilting my body to the light, this way and that, diffusing myself. To be whole as constellations are whole, as water is whole, as waves are whole, as a hole is whole the in-between is the most important part Tide moves out: are you at high tide, with its depth and insistence and surety? with its reaching and exploration and curiosity? are you at low tide, the sucking lull, the exposed and exposure? the leaving behind, the nurturing new ecosystems through absence? Tide moves in: to the breath, to breathing itself whole
Hi Samantha —
“The capacity con” is such a sharp naming.
What stayed with me most is your shift from expanding capacity to enhancing our power to receive. That reframes the whole conversation. If capacity is only measured by how much we can hold or produce, it will always mirror extraction.
This line especially lingered: “When we continue to think it is our responsibility to manage our own capacity, we will continue extracting from ourselves & each other.”
That feels like a critical tension. I spend a lot of time thinking about capacity at the individual design level — margin, recovery, containment — but you’re asking a larger question: who benefits when we internalize the burden of “managing” scarcity that was structurally engineered?
Your water imagery is powerful. Circulation, permeability, exchange. Capacity not as endurance, but as relational flow.
I’m curious — what does collective capacity look like in practice, beyond metaphor? Where have you seen it embodied, not just imagined?
Thank you for stretching the frame here.
— Kelly