Who Gets to Be at Capacity?

Capacity Is Not Neutral

“I don’t have capacity.”

It’s a phrase I hear constantly — in activist spaces, intentional communities, friendships, parenting circles, and therapy rooms. It is offered as explanation, boundary, justification, and sometimes absolution.

And sometimes, it is true.

But increasingly, I hear it used by people with far more structural protection than many others — often white, often middle-class, often partnered within nuclear families — as a way of stepping back from communal responsibility while still claiming the language of care.

Capacity, as it’s commonly used, is treated like a fixed resource. A battery. A finite allotment.

But for many of us, capacity was never a given. It was forged.

Capacity Is Forged, Not Given

There are people in this world who never had the option to say, “I don’t have capacity.”

Single mothers working multiple jobs. Migrants navigating hostile borders. Black and Brown communities surviving systems designed to break them. Queer youth building chosen families after rejection. Indigenous communities maintaining culture under colonization.

They did not begin with capacity. They were stretched into it.

Capacity, in this sense, is not a personality trait.

It is an adaptive response to necessity.

And yet, those who have had the most structural support are often the first to declare its limits.

What You Call My Capacity

People often tell me I have a “high capacity.”

They say it with admiration, as if it’s a strength — resilience, competence, emotional range.

But the truth is far less flattering.

I never had the option not to have it.

What you are witnessing is not capacity.

It is accumulation.

It is the sediment of unbearable obstacles.

It is the shape a person takes when there is no exit.

It is who I had to become to survive what I did not choose.

Capacity, in this sense, is not a virtue.

It is often a scar.

So when someone with structural protection says, “I don’t have the capacity,” I hear a different sentence beneath it:

I have not yet been forced to expand in that way.

And I don’t wish that expansion on anyone.

But I do wish for honesty about where capacity comes from — and who has been required to grow it just to stay alive.

When Capacity Becomes a Load-Bearing Role

Systems redistribute weight toward those who can carry it.

In families, workplaces, activist spaces, friendships, and communities, the people who have cultivated the most capacity — often through hardship — become the load-bearing walls.

They notice what others miss.

They respond when others freeze.

They organize when others withdraw.

They absorb when others deflect.

And because they can, they are expected to.

Not explicitly. Not always consciously.

But reliably.

Over time, this becomes a quiet economy: those with the most capacity subsidize those with the least.

The competent become indispensable.

The resilient become over-relied upon.

The attuned become responsible for everyone’s nervous system.

And the system stabilizes — not because it is healthy, but because someone is compensating for its failures.

When Competence Becomes Abandonment

There is another violence hidden inside the language of capacity:

When people perceive you as capable, they stop helping you.

They see you as sturdy.

They see you as strong.

They see you as the one who can handle it.

And so they withdraw.

Not out of malice — often out of relief.

If they’ve got it, I don’t have to step in.

But what looks like respect is often abandonment.

Because being able to carry something does not mean you should have to carry it alone.

When you are cast as the competent one, an asymmetry forms:

• You offer support more than you receive it.

• You are turned to in crisis, but rarely held in yours.

• Your distress is minimized because you are expected to manage it.

• Your needs are overlooked because you are seen as self-sufficient.

Over time, this reinforces itself:

neglect becomes forced expansion

forced expansion becomes increased expectations

increased expectations becomes further neglect.

A closed loop of endurance.

We see this pattern across many marginalized experiences. Strength is praised in ways that justify withholding care.

Black women are called strong and denied support.

Queer people are expected to build chosen families after exclusion from traditional ones.

Immigrant and Hispanic workers sustain the households and children of wealthier families while their own families receive fewer resources.

Indigenous communities are asked to preserve land and culture under ongoing dispossession.

These burdens are reframed as culture, resilience, or natural aptitude.

But they are redistributed labor — emotional, relational, and physical — required to stabilize unequal systems.

Strength forged through hardship is not proof that care is unnecessary.

It is proof that care was withheld.

The Right to Comfort

This dynamic is inseparable from what scholars and organizers describe as the white right to comfort — a pillar of white supremacy culture.

The right to comfort assumes that one’s emotional ease and sense of goodness should not be disrupted. It prioritizes avoiding discomfort over confronting harm.

When this right is unconsciously upheld, “I don’t have capacity” can become a socially acceptable way of saying:

• I don’t want to feel uncomfortable.

• I don’t want to confront conflict.

• I don’t want to risk my sense of being a good person.

• I don’t want to be implicated in harm or responsibility.

Discomfort is treated as danger.Withdrawal is framed as self-care.

And those who remain in the discomfort — often those with less structural protection — are left to carry the reality alone.

The right to comfort does not eliminate discomfort.

It redistributes it.

Capacity Is Structurally Shaped

What we call “capacity” is not simply personal bandwidth.

It is shaped by the structures we live inside.

The nuclear family, heteronormativity, and individualism do not just organize intimacy — they organize labor, care, and responsibility.

When care is privatized into a couple or a small household, the load intensifies.

When community is optional, support disappears.

When kinship is narrowed, reciprocity shrinks.

People become exhausted not because they lack capacity, but because the structure they inhabit concentrates the weight.

I saw this clearly in Guatemala.

I met someone building an intentional community — a food forest, a shared vision, an invitation for others to invest in reciprocity. On paper, it was everything I believe in.

In reality, during the two months I was there, I was harassed daily. My body lived in vigilance. I now recognize I was in a trauma state.

No one asked whether I had the capacity to endure that.

The person inviting others into “community” had a litany of reasons for not showing up: teaching, partnership strain, parenting, exhaustion.

“I’m at capacity.”

And it matters what structures people are living inside when they say that.

She is bisexual, but living a thoroughly heteronormative, privatized life: a couple-based household, a young child, and the familiar isolation of the nuclear family. She had not queered her kinship or expanded care beyond the household.

Of course she was depleted — because that structure concentrates the load and cuts people off from reciprocal support.

This is not a personal failing.

It is a structural reality.

We are taught to build lives that isolate us — and then blame ourselves when we cannot carry them alone.

Capacity Without Reciprocity Is Extraction

Capacity is meant to circulate.

In healthy systems:

• strength rotates

• care flows in multiple directions

• those who carry are also carried

But in extractive systems — capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, rigid nuclear family structures — capacity moves in one direction.

Toward productivity.Toward stability.Toward maintaining the illusion that everything is fine.

And those who hold the most are left with the least support.

This is not resilience.This is extraction.

A Different Question

The question is not:

Do I have capacity?

The question is:

How is capacity being distributed here — and who is carrying the load?

Because real community is not built on a few people enduring more.

It is built when the weight is shared.

We do not need stronger individuals.

We need structures where no one is required to be strong alone.