🌿 The Grove Journals #40
The Job That Never Fit and the One That Finally Does — On Heart-Capacity, Time-Capacity, and the Difference Between Them
On why I used to think I hated tech work — and what a $10,000 invoice taught me about what I actually hated.
I want to tell you about a sentence that rearranged something in me this week, because it came out of my own mouth before I even realized I believed it.
I was talking about the local tech company I had done some work for, about the unexpected hour cuts, about that whole stretch of feeling like a dancing circus bear who only ever got claps and never got peanuts — and I heard myself say: I don’t hate tech. I resented work that didn’t feed my spirit and pay me well.
Stop. Rewind. Say that again.
Because for the better part of two years, I’ve been telling myself (and probably some of you) a tidier, simpler story: I’m soft-retiring from tech. Writing is the real dream. Tech is the thing I’m tolerating until the words pay enough to let me quit.
And that story isn’t wrong, exactly. But it’s not the whole truth either.
It flattened something that actually has more shape to it than “I don’t like this industry or work anymore after almost 30 years in it.”
Here’s the shape, once I finally looked at it straight: it was never tech. It was the specific kind of tech — the four-hours-a-week, feast-or-famine, undercharging-because-it-circumvents-procurement, one-off-favor-grinding kind of tech.
The kind where I was giving my actual skill away for scraps because I hadn’t yet learned I was allowed to charge for the whole of what I bring, not just the line-item task.
And then this week happened.
I sat down with a customer— a client relationship I’ve actually gotten to build slowly, on my own terms, with real trust in both directions — and I sent an invoice for more money in a single line item than I have ever asked anyone for (on a single invoice) in my entire freelance life. Five figures. And he didn’t blink. He got excited. Wanted to talk timeline. Wanted to talk about what’s next.
That is not the same job as all the years I spent in the corporate 9-5 grind, or even helping out a local tech company. It never was. I just didn’t have the language yet to explain why it felt so different in my body, until this week handed it to me.
Here’s the language: heart-capacity and time-capacity are not the same resource, and I have spent a very long time treating them like they were interchangeable.
Time-capacity is the hours on the clock. It’s finite, it’s measurable, it’s the thing every productivity app wants to help you optimize. Four hours a week. Twenty hours a week. A sprint. A deadline.
Heart-capacity is something else entirely. It’s how much of you — your actual attention, your care, your creative problem-solving, the part of you that gets genuinely curious about a gnarly bug at 11pm because you want to solve it, not because you’re clocked in — you have available to bring to a piece of work. And it doesn’t scale on the same axis as time at all. You can have four hours and zero heart-capacity for a task. You can have forty minutes and an overflowing well of it.
I had plenty of time-capacity for tech jobs, most weeks. What I never had — and what I quietly starved for years without naming it — was heart-capacity for it.
The work was meaningless to me in a way that had nothing to do with the actual technical content and everything to do with the container it lived in — undervalued, underpaid, treated as an afterthought, never quite mattering to anyone including, eventually, me.
This new chapter in my tech work is the opposite container. A new project we’re lovingly referring to as “The Portal” project — is infrastructure that will actually affect and make a real difference in real people’s lives. It’s work I want to be good at. It matters. My customer treats it like it matters. And so, my heart-capacity for it is enormous, even on weeks when my actual clock-hours are thin.
And here’s where this turns into a writing letter, because with me it always does — the personal and the creative are the same river, they always have been.
I think readers can feel this exact same distinction in a manuscript, and I don’t think I fully understood that until this week either.
You can tell — you can always tell — when a writer showed up with time-capacity only. The scene technically happens. The plot beat lands where it’s supposed to. But there’s a flatness to it, a going-through-the-motions quality that no amount of competent craft fully disguises.
And you can tell, just as clearly, when a writer showed up with their whole heart in it — even in a rough draft, even in a scene that needs three more editing passes. Something underneath the sentences is alive.
Readers can smell disengaged work from three rooms away, same as clients can. I used to think that was just a “quality” problem — write better, edit harder, fix the craft issue.
But some of what readers are actually responding to isn’t craft at all. It’s presence.
It’s whether the person who wrote this was actually here, heart fully in the room, or just clocking hours until the word count hit its mark.
🔒 The rest of this letter — the real ledger from a quiet week, the specific numbers behind that invoice excitement, and a journaling exercise on where you might be confusing heart-capacity with time-capacity in your own life — is below, for paid subscribers.
