Identifying details and some non-essential circumstances have been changed to protect the privacy of the people involved.
My friend remembered that she didn’t have to swallow information whole.
But she also knew that it still takes up space.
It asks for attention and time.
So she needed to give it somewhere to go.
Because her life was already full with the thousand things that keep ordinary life going.
She was at capacity.
Capacity isn’t a measure of how much we care.
It’s how much room we have.
Right now.
My friend cared about what was happening in the world.
She wanted to understand it.
She didn’t want to turn away simply because something was frightening or inconvenient.
But she couldn’t investigate every claim, follow every crisis, prepare for every possibility and remain available for the life she was actually living.
She had been asking:
What else do I need to know?
Now there was another question:
How much of this can I realistically hold?
Not forever.
Now.
Capacity changes.
Something we can take in on a quiet morning may be the thing that knocks us sideways at the end of a brutal week.
Being intelligent and responsible didn’t mean she could hold everything.
She had limits.
And she’d already seen what happened when she pushed past them.
And while she was trying to work out whether the world she knew still existed, the life in front of her kept going.
The internet wasn’t going to protect her.
It wasn’t going to tap her on the shoulder and say:
That’s enough for today. Go and live your life.
She would have to decide when she had taken in enough.
And it depended on what was happening in her life and why she was still reading.
Did this information affect a decision she needed to make?
Was there something concrete she needed to do?
Could she give it enough attention to examine it properly?
What would taking in more push aside?
And was she still thinking—or had she started spinning again?
There was an awkward bit too.
Stopping can be an honest recognition of capacity.
It can also be avoidance.
They can look much the same, even to the person doing it.
She would have to ask herself:
Am I turning away because I don’t want to know?
Or:
Am I saying not today because I can’t meet this properly today?
Sometimes the honest answer would be:
Not today.
Maybe she would come back to it later.
Maybe she wouldn’t.
The fact that something was important didn’t automatically make it hers to carry.
Some information might directly affect her family, her work, her safety or a decision she needed to make.
If it did, she might need to check it properly, act on it or ask someone who knew more than she did.
What she needed to work out was whether any of the things she had unloaded over coffee required something from her that day.
They had frightened her.
Fear had put them all on the same level.
But they weren’t all equally urgent.
She could care about a war without following it hour by hour.
She could take exploitation seriously without exposing herself to every horrific detail.
Reading more and more wasn’t necessarily helping anyone.
Open does not mean permanently exposed.
She could remain open to a question and still close the laptop.
She could say:
I don’t know.
Then get dinner on.
If the question still deserved her attention tomorrow, it would still be there.
Her time and attention were finite.
Where they went was important.
She didn’t have to meet the whole world in one sitting.
My friend still didn’t know WTF was going on.
Neither do I.
But we can still decide what needs our attention.
What doesn’t.
And when we’ve had enough.