In my younger years, I was often complimented for my firm grip. Physically, I mean. I was skinny as a stick and not at all strong, but I could hold on tightly to something or someone and they’d have a hell of a time prying me off. My dad used to call me spider-monkey because whenever I was awake when he left for work or home when he returned, I would climb up his legs, wrap my skinny-as-sticks-arms — my brother, for his part, called me “twig” — as tightly as I could around them, and cling for dear life. It was a feat to loosen me.
I famously collected great masses of things for (often unspecified) creative projects that quickly turned unruly. I literally carried around suitcases of these collections everywhere I went. My favorite suitcase was a bright pink plastic suitcase (pictured to the right) that I would carry around the house, determined to take these odd little collections everywhere I went. Being a creative, sentimental collector with a firm grip means I like to get stuff, I like to spread out, I associate memories with everything, and I have a hard time getting rid of and letting go. So, you can imagine how neat and tidy my room was growing up!
Read: borderline hoarder.
A lot of my parents’ parenting in my elementary years involved containing: you can have this corner of the garden to build your fairy home, your stuff when we move has to fit in these boxes, no you cannot turn the entire living room into a “Museum of Mysteries” but we will give you this little pop-up tent as your museum instead. I pushed and pulled at these limitations, always trying to expand them by an inch or two or a few miles.
I’m a collector and a clinger, a gatherer and a tight-gripper — to stuff, to relationships, to my dreams and expectations, and sometimes even, to my regrets and anger. I thought I could do both: I can have a lot of friends and keep up with all of them forever. I can buy new stuff and keep the old stuff. I can hold tightly to my dreams, amass new fears and regrets and carry around the old ones (this one is less intentional, of course), push myself to show up for twenty-plus friends equally at the drop of a hat and promise each one that I’ll always be there.
Unsurprisingly, your life starts getting really heavy and crowded when you’re both constantly collecting and refusing to let go. These two competing desires have tugged at each other, struggling against one another most of my life. It may not be the pink plastic suitcase anymore, but I still tend to carry around a lot of luggage. I think most of us do.
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Last year, in the middle of one of many of my “burnout cycles” — a term I have coined for when I seriously overextend myself for a prolonged period and then suddenly, somehow always surprisingly, crash — my therapist brought up the very obvious fact to me that you can’t be everyone’s best friend, and not everyone is meant to stay in your life forever. I know, I said, duh.
She sent me the Ten Percent Happier podcast called “The Science of Making and Keeping Friends: Robin Dunbar” (the same psychologist who was cited in the article “The Case for Fewer Friends” that CJ Green shared recently). In this podcast Robin Dunbar discuses what he has termed “Dunbar’s number,” which is a measurement of the number of meaningful relationships our brain is capable of maintaining at any time. Dunbar believes this is capped at about 150. But not all 150 relationships are equal, of course: the circles get smaller and more intimate the further you go in, and at the core, he argues that you can have about fifteen good friends in your close circle, and only about five people in your tightest, most intimate circle.
This podcast got me thinking about social limitations specifically, but also human limitations generally, as there are far wider implications to Dunbar’s argument. I have spent much of my life trying to find a way around limitations, some kind of cheat route to bypass them. It’s not only exhausting, but arrogant — to think I could handle more than the average human. Which, by the way, includes Jesus. Jesus who had twelve (not fifty!) disciples and three (Peter, James, and John) in his tightest circle. Jesus knew and experienced human limitations, but instead of trying to find a way around them — if any one person could do that successfully, it would be our savior — he embraced them. Maybe, I began to realize, limitations are actually good. Maybe they’re healthy and natural and even beautiful.
Fast forward to a couple months ago, and I had entered another burnout cycle. I was once again buckling under the weight of all my yeses and seriously testing my relational capacity. I kept thinking to myself, “I have no room leftover and no time for spontaneity and margin in my life and everything is crowded and I have knots in my back. I say yes to everyone and I have too much stuff and there’s no more room.”
And then a friend gently, but firmly told me: “Sarah, you look absolutely exhausted. You’re trying to be too much for too many people. If you don’t learn your limits and learn how to say no, you’re going to run yourself into the ground.” Ouch. I guess I’m not superhuman.
That was probably the best advice I’ve been given in five years. I had been collecting too many relationships and things and expectations and holding them all too tightly. I knew I needed to lighten my load and make more room. I was talking about this with two of my closest friends recently, and one of them told me about a chapter in a book she had been reading that addressed just that — don’t you love it when that happens?
Author Shauna Niequist
Earlier this year, one of my favorite writers Shauna Niequist published her next wonderful book I Guess I Haven’t Learned That Yet: Discovering New Ways of Living When the Old Ways Stop Working. (PSA, if you haven’t read any of her books before and are looking for a book that feels like a warm hug, check her out). This book is a series of vignettes about lessons she’s learning — and unlearning — in her mid-life; it’s about her literal and metaphorical transition to a lighter life as she and her husband and two sons moved from a house in the Chicago suburbs where she lived surrounded by her extended family her whole life to an 825-square-foot apartment in the heart of New York City where they hardly knew anyone.
In my favorite chapter so far, “Living Lightly,” she writes this:
So much of the life I’ve lived up to this point was about holding things together, preserving them, never letting something fall or fall apart. It was like I was building a fortress, thick walls and foundations that went practically to the center of earth itself. I was gathering people and years and traditions, wrapping people into it, weaving families and stories and moments and dinners together, trying to make something heavy and durable, something that would keep me safe. […]
I thought I needed a great army of friends, eleven sets of dishes, six pairs of boots, and two thousand books. I thought I needed an institution, a board of directors, a cozy blanket of like-minded, supportive people spread all over the country who would have my back in a heartbeat. Turns out you need three sweaters, rent money, and five really good people. You need eggs and coffee. A kindle account, a metro card, and one good umbrella.
Not every thing is a forever thing, and not every friend is a forever friend. But impermanence is not always a reflection of something’s value. In the middle of moving (again) and struggling to get rid of things, I’m once again realizing that meaningful is more important than more.
In a season (or rather, decade, it seems, being in my twenties) of near-constant change, I am learning, over and over again, to loosen my fingers from the things that fade, and redirect my hold to heaven, to Jesus. It’s not the tightness of the grip that will tether us and burn us out, I’m convinced, but the things (and the amount of them) to which we cling so tightly. As Niequist suggests, it turns out you don’t need to cling onto everything for dear life. Doing so will strip you of the fulfilling life you’re hoping they will give you. All that’s really needed, it turns out, is to cling to the source of life, Jesus, and to a handful of your closest people. Everything else can be held loosely.
I want to live within my limits and hold tightest to that which frees me most. I want to climb up Jesus’ legs, wrap my (less)-skinny-as-sticks-arms as tightly as I can around them, and cling for dear life. His right hand will uphold me (Ps 63:8), and he offers to carry what was never mine to cling and hold. A lighter load, indeed.
COMMENTS
5 responses to “Learning Limitations When There’s No More Room”
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What a wonderful reminder to loosen our grip on the things that we can no longer hold onto. Thank you for this essay, Sarah!
I think for me the habit of gathering is a form of protection and a subtle effort to gather what I think I need. In truth we are made to be grasped and we are grasped in an unbreakable grip by the Cosmos’ all time champion spider monkey, God. And knowing that I am so thoroughly grasped makes holding on loosely easier.
Thanks for this wonderful article, Sarah. I’ve never been one that was good at learning limitations and to let go of things. For a long time I thought I had such a small friend pool because I had squandered to develop friendships in high school and “the best years of our lives” college. I’ve tried after both of those “failed” periods of my life to reach out to more people and quickly realized I was not very capable at that as the burn out set in rapidly.
Letting go of people and even of material things that are cherished for the sentimental memories I’ve ascribed to them is something I’ve always been bad at. This message reminds me of why I can get let go and where I can run to for the source of that life-giving spirit.
I recently read about Dunbar’s number in another article. Loved how you connected that to our limitations and Jesus’ 12 disciples/3 three closest!
[…] they are messy and hard and sometimes they don’t work out or aren’t meant to last forever. As I’ve written about before, impermanence is not always a reflection of value, and a lot of friends are a gift for a season. […]