Capability vs Capacity

I’ve spoken a lot about this with clients these past months, and I have also reflected a huge amount about this for my own self

It is of course far more complex than the title suggests, it is unique, it is detailed, but here is a broad overview of some of the thoughts I personally have with capability vs capacity.

During school, particularly secondary, I was branded by most teachers as not being particularly capable. “You won’t amount to much” is a remark that sticks pretty deeply and often shows his face to me in vulnerable or lower points. I wasn’t ‘mainstream’ academic. I struggled with the ‘mainstream’ environment of school. Heck, I wasn’t ‘mainstream’!

What this looked like to the external observer at the time, was that I was daydreaming, not paying attention, not interested, not intelligent. Now I can look back at that time and see a girl who was in a constant, highly threatened state. A high alert survival state where my mindbody nervous system was consistently, brutally being triggered. I was not in any kind of environment to learn, and my way of learning also looked very different to how they wanted to teach me.

The outcome? I left school feeling bewildered, broken, and lost. I believed I was not intelligent, I believed I wasn’t good at much at all. I believed I had very little capability, and that I must have more capacity. I must do more, try harder, work more. This took me to some dark and dangerous places (a blog for another time perhaps).

“I do not have the capacity for loud revolution. I’m here for INNER revolution” (Trauma Geek).

It has taken me years to really start to break down those pillars of belief and shame dust clogging up my authentic way of being. It has not been a linear road, but a jumbled, bumpy road with lots of mistakes and lots of tears, but ultimately learning. Learning, that it was perhaps just the wrong environment for me. It was the wrong approach for me.

I have two degrees now, I love learning and anyone who knows me knows that I am finding I can not stop learning about my interests, I adore writing, expressing myself with art or music. I am not unintelligent (whatever intelligence actually is?!). I am now able to recognise my flowing capabilities, and I am able to recognise how my capacity impacts that capability. I am not so good at recognising my capacity, because social and political neuronormative expectations have conditioned me to believe my capacity should be like everyone else’s.

I did not have the capacity to learn in school. The environment wrecked my nervous system, I did not have the capacity for much at all. When I am overwhelmed now, it is still hard to recognise my capacity and the triggers that impact it, because I was not shown how to listen to them. This is all new neural pathways and understanding building here!

I am highly capable with lots of things, given the right environment and the right support. But when I do not have that, that capability plummets under the weight of my capacity depletion. It is like the walls of capacity crumble and completely squishes my capability.

And this refined balance between capability and capacity doesn’t just apply to doing work, it applies to absolutely everything for me. In social situations, if I am in the right environment, if I am not too drained and I have more ‘spoons’, then my capability to speaking verbally and follow the highly detailed and intricate parts of communicating are at top speed. If my capacity is low, if the environment is triggering, I might not be able to speak, I might quickly go into shut down. Those walls of capacity crumble and I lose a lot of my capability.

That depletion of capability, does not reflect my authentic abilities. It just means my capacity is low.

Of course the balance of capability and capacity is massively influenced by the external environment (people, things, sensory). It is also influenced by the internal drag of the shame dust.

My understanding of my capability was dragged down massively for a long time by that shame dust that school so kindly coughed all over me, and I had no choice but to breathe it in. It meant my awareness of my capabilities was severely tarnished, and skewed. It takes time to shake that shame dust off and see what we are potentially capable of.

It has helped me hugely to be more aware of this balance. To check in with it whenever I can. How is my capacity doing today? What does it need? For me, that means tuning in and understanding my nervous system. I see my nervous system as my capacity. And that also means tuning into my environment and acknowledging how much my environment could affect my capacity/nervous system. Whether we think of our nervous systems as ‘capacity cups’ as Helen Edgar at Autistic Realms puts or Mobile batteries, as I think Jodie Clarke demonstrated. It is worth understanding our own unique capacity and what impacts it, what nourishes it, how it might flourish.

Then it is working on that internal shame dust. Shaking off those disapproving, disappointing, inaccurate words or feelings. They are not yours, I do not believe you emerged into this world believing that, they were put there. Uncovering your true capability, exploring it non-judgementally. Capabilities change; they move, they develop, they shrink, and they evolve. All of that is ok. Sometimes they need extra capacity, extra support, sometimes they will flourish unexpectedly.

Sometimes we have the capacity of a football stadium, sometimes a beer barrel, sometimes our capacity is squished to the size of an egg cup. For us neurodivergent folk especially, this will impact our capability for that time. That is ok. Listen to it.

I was reminded of this fantastic T’Pau track through the exceptional ‘Dying for Sex’ series. Reminds me of sitting and staring at maths homework and crying with exhaustion. Then putting my pen down and just moving my body, authentically shifting that freeze survival state without even knowing what I was doing. Heart and Soul - T’Pau