Capable people don't get to fall apart

I’m the kind of person that people come to with questions like, ‘Do you know what this tax code means’? ‘If I’m using dried lentils instead of canned, do I need to soak them first’? ‘Should I book the flights now or would it be cheaper if I waited a few weeks’? ‘Can I send a Kindle book to someone else’s library’? ‘Is there a way to put a password on an Excel file’? ‘Do you have to register on that website before you use their booking system’? ‘Do you know what this warning light that’s just come on my car means’? ‘Do I have to get proper photos done to renew my driving licence or can I just take some on my phone’?

In most cases, I don’t know the answer to these questions either. But I solve them the same way I solve most things for myself — I Google (what did we do before Google, really!?)

People seem to perceive me as being somewhat a capable person. Someone who ‘just knows’ how to do things. How to sort or figure things out. And, yes, I kind of do. And yes, that is a kind of capability.

I also quite like thinking of myself and being looked upon as a ‘capable’ person, so I imagine I play up to it too.

But it’s all underpinned by a stubborn emphasis on self-sufficiency and an irrational belief that if I ever asked anyone for help ‘I’d be bothering them’.

For whatever reason, then, I seem to be the person that people come to when they have a problem that needs solving. Generally, a fairly mundane life admin task that is baffling, confusing or stressing them out. Often, it’s easy, I know the answer straight away (it’s something I’ve previously figured out for myself and can pass the knowledge on), other times I find myself researching or looking things up on the other person’s behalf, seeing if I can find the information that will answer their question.

I know I don’t have to do this. I could just say ‘Sorry, I don’t know, can’t help’. But it’s not in my nature nor my persona — ‘Capable people’ don’t say ‘I don’t know’, they say ‘leave it with me, I’ll sort it’.

I was ruminating on this as I did a ‘problem-solving-Google’ on my phone while I walked my dog through the woods. I should have been engaging in nature but instead, I was engaging in keyword searches and speed reads, till ‘a-ha’ found it ‘copy and paste link’ into message, send to person, problem solved. I pushed my phone back in my pocket and suddenly felt an overwhelming rush of anger. ‘Why can’t people do that for themselves, figure things out like I do? It’s not hard, it took me all of a few minutes’.

I knew though, that was only the surface tension. I wasn’t angry with them; I was placing my anger on them.

I was angry because I knew I could never do what they did — just text someone with a question knowing they would likely sort it out for them — because ‘capable people’ don’t do that. I was envious because as a ‘capable person’, you don’t get to ask for help; you sort it out yourself. And in sorting it out for yourself you sort it out for others.

But ultimately, I was angry because capable people don’t get to fall apart — because they are relied upon to not, no matter how mundane or serious the problem.

There have been many occasions over the last few years, while I’ve been working on the Women of Ireland Project — gathering women’s stories, weaving their words together, deciding on chapters for the book — that I feel I have been sent an emotional experience to more closely understand something the women I’ve interviewed have told me.

Today, as I descended down the steep Welsh valley I live in, leaving the dark gloom of the forest and my angry ruminating behind me, entering back into the crisp cold of an open Spring sky, I knew this to be such a moment.

My mind immediately flooded with quotes from women:

The gut-punching resonance I felt when Nat explained how “Women of Ireland have been taught to be so dependent on everything outside of themselves yet be THE dependent for everybody else”.

How Elaine described the “massive sense of responsibility” she feels towards others, and it’s something “a lot of Irish women do” — they “try to do the right thing” and “fix” whatever is going on for others:

“Women have, throughout the ages in Ireland, woman have tried to make” whatever is going on “palatable for everybody”.

And Caitlin’s description of how women in Ireland literally and metaphorically tidy things up with a ‘lace curtain’:

“Like you could clearly see, in lots of my grandmother's sibling’s marriages that the women were the strong ones, and the men had their flaws, but the women just picked them up, picked up the men's flaws and brushed them over with a lace curtain or made it look fine…. You know, she's holding it together. She's holding it all together for society”.

They tidy away whatever is going on, usually by imbibing it themselves, becoming the vessel and the container within which the pain, strain, stress or shame of others becomes their own and then they make a nice curtain and hang it up between them and the world beyond, making sure the world only ever sees the filtered version — the ‘capable’ person who has it all together (or rather, is holding it all together).

I don’t think any of this — of women being the space-holders, the capable ones, the ones who sort out problems for others, hide what’s going on so no one ever sees the chaos behind that lace curtain — is at all unique to the women of Ireland. But it is very prevalent. Women’s stories have shown me that it’s almost endemic.

I often think, if you were to do a social network analysis of the average Irish family (of siblings and parents and cousins and grandparents) there would be one woman, possibly two who are the central actors in that entire network. The women who hold all the information, keep the secrets, fix the problems, orchestrate and organise; she’s the go-to woman for an entire family ecosystem, they most likely think she’s a fusser and a meddler but they also don’t know how to cope without her. Usually she’s the eldest sister, or the only sister in a whole heap of brothers.

That is her role. She is the ‘capable one’ and she’s been trained up for it since birth, or she’s inherited it when the prior holder of the role (a mother, an aunt, a sister) just couldn’t hack it anymore.

Anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes (and I know I quote her a lot, but I can’t help it because her work is always so apt!) described how girls (in the Kerry village where she focused her study) are raised and socialised differently to boys; they are given responsibility from a young age and they grow up with a clear level of self-reliance and capability because of it:

“Village parents also distinguish gross personality differences between boys and girls. Whereas girls are perceived as ‘catty, sharp, and underhanded’, little boys are often described as helpless, innocent, and guileless (“like jelly”, one mother offered)…. because sisters are believed to be more crabbit (bold) and cute (sly), they are expected to watch over their brothers and take care of their wants and needs. And where little girls as young as five and six are expected to take responsibility for real chores around the house and garden and are frequently sent to run errands and gather gossip for their mothers, little boys of the same age are assigned only make-believe tasks. The whole family smiled indulgently as little Rory, for example, pretends to drive the cows home with a tiny stick behind Daddy, who wields a real switch. “Isn’t he ever the little man?” a mother will ask in mocking jest….. By the age of puberty, village girls have learned the womanly arts of child tending, housekeeping, and bread-making as well as the social graces necessary for mixing with strangers…. By contrast, adolescent boys have had only sporadic contact with the agricultural and herding work of their fathers, and little introduction to the wider adult male social spheres”.

While the context that Scheper-Hughes describes is now dated, the underlying social system and socialisation process is not. Across many of the women I’ve interviewed, there are stories that echo this — of being expected to take on responsibilities like looking after younger siblings and other domestic duties from a very young age, while similar was not expected of male siblings. It’s a physical training — ‘here’s how to do things’ — that belies a psychological training — ‘here’s how to (re)act about things’— where (re)acting is focused on making everything look good and fine and okay. The two go hand-in-hand; the individual has already been trained to be ‘capable’ having been given responsibility for a variety of (physical) tasks from a young age, so the natural progression is that people (having come to view them as ‘capable’) lean on them to sort out life’s travails much the same way they might sort out a roast chicken.

It’s like how Deirdre, as she told me of a point in her childhood when her family were going through a period of change and the (psychological) going was getting tough, it was to her that her mother turned:

“Relying on me to continue motivating the other siblings, if you know what I mean, to keep that motivation”.

And when you get both viewed and relied upon in this way, you never get to be the one who falls apart.

I have no neat little ending, no nuggets of possible wisdom as to what all this means or how such things end. All I know is that Ireland has, ‘across the ages’ leaned heavily on an army of ‘capable’ women and that, more and more, as traditional networks of support and interpersonal relationships become ever more distant and diminished, I wonder how tenable that ‘capable’ archetype or persona is? It feels good to be looked upon as such a person, but the burden of it can be immense.