🌿 The Grove Journals #38
The Capable One and the Line I Kept Cutting
On the difference between strong and capable — and the silly, un-sensored voice I’ve been leaving at the door of my own writing.
There’s a particular kind of quiet that settles over a house when the money’s gone and the next check hasn’t landed yet.
I know that quiet well. I’ve lived inside it more times than I’d like to count. And this past week — in the thick of a heat wave mean enough to warp the air, with my son away and just me and the four-cat court holding down the homestead — that quiet moved back in for a few days.
We were fine. Let me say that up front, because I know some of you read these dispatches with your own knot of scarcity sitting in your chest, and I don’t want to hand you mine without the ending attached. We were fine. The cats ate — a little too well, honestly. They discovered that a lean week for me means a slightly more generous week of “people food” for them, and they have since filed a formal request that I go broke more often. (The litter box filed a formal complaint. We remain at an impasse.)
But somewhere in the middle of that quiet — tallying what was left, rationing the good coffee, doing the mental math I’ve done a thousand times — I caught myself reaching for the old story. The one I’ve told myself my whole life.
You’re strong. You’ll get through it. You always do.
And this time, for the first time, the word didn’t fit.
Because strong — I’ve come to realize — was never a compliment I earned.
It was a coat I got handed because the weather was terrible and no one else was going to bring me one.
“Strong” is what we call people who were never given the option to fall apart.
It’s survival wearing a medal it never asked for. And loves, I am so tired of being strong.
But sitting there in the lean quiet, I found a different word underneath it. A truer one…
Capable.
I’m not strong. I’m capable. And oh — the difference is everything.
Strong is a burden. Capable is a resource.
Strong says you have no choice but to carry this. Capable says you have hands that know how to work.
Strong is what happened to me. Capable is what I built out of the wreckage — quietly, over years, one hard-won skill at a time — until I looked up in a fundless heat wave and understood something clean and solid: the person my little family relies on isn’t a martyr gritting her teeth. She’s a woman who knows how to make a plan, stretch a dollar, feed the creatures she loves, and keep the lights on. Not because she has to.
Because she can.
And here’s where this turns into a writing letter —
🔏(More from the den below — the real, unvarnished numbers from a week held without panic, how I learned my “shallow waters” and “deep waters” are all part of the same ocean, and a small journaling exercise for finding the voice you’ve been leaving at the door too.)
