I'm no stranger to the belief that more effort gets you more results. From early childhood I was told I was being lazy and needed to apply myself. Somewhere along the way I decided that everyone had to work this hard just to show up in public. I figured they were all pushing past 100%, and that was why they made things look so effortless.

The funny thing is, my school records tell a different story than "lazy." In first grade I was identified with a learning disability in reading, spelling, and writing. I repeated third grade. One evaluation from that time described "a severe discrepancy" between my ability and my achievement. My reasoning scores landed in the average to superior range, while my reading and writing sat near the bottom. Teachers noted that I rushed through written work, lost my materials, and didn't turn homework in on time. On paper, that looks like a kid who isn't trying. From the inside, I was trying constantly and still coming up short.

I remember studying people and trying to work out what made them so successful. I always felt about five years behind, as if part of me had stopped moving forward for a while. Repeating a grade made that feeling literal, but it never really went away after that. So I was always finding clever workarounds to get through the present. Later I'd feel like I was finally catching up to those past moments, only to find myself struggling with the present all over again.

I remember my father telling me that sometimes I needed to give 110% to see things through to the finish line, and that the only person responsible for my failures was me.

There is no such thing as giving 110%. When you try, you run up a deficit in other parts of your life.

The math doesn't work

100% is everything you have, so the extra 10% has to come from somewhere. It gets borrowed from sleep, from your relationships, from your patience with the people you love, from your health, from tomorrow. You can get away with it for a while, sometimes for a long while. But borrowed is still borrowed, and eventually you pay it back, usually at a time you didn't choose.

I can point to exactly where my borrowing came from. Sleep has been a problem for as long as I can remember, and some nights it takes me hours to fall asleep before work the next morning. Taking care of myself is the first thing to slip; on hard weeks, getting in the shower even once is a fight. And the people closest to me get the version of me that's left at the end of the day. I'm at my best in the morning. By evening I've been told I come across as short and argumentative, often before I've noticed it myself.

I've also seen the pattern play out in my mood. When my workload and commitments drop, I start feeling like myself again. When the load climbs back up, the low comes back with it. That isn't a coincidence. That's the bill arriving.

For most of my life I didn't see any of that as borrowing. I thought it was just what effort felt like. When I crashed afterward, I didn't blame the math. I blamed myself, and I read the crash as more proof that I was lazy.

Spoon theory

In 2003, Christine Miserandino wrote an essay called The Spoon Theory. She was trying to explain to a friend what living with lupus was like. They were sitting in a diner, so she gathered up a handful of spoons and handed them to her friend. Each spoon stood for a unit of energy for the day. Then she walked her friend through an ordinary morning, taking away a spoon for each task: getting out of bed, showering, getting dressed, commuting. Before the day was half over, her friend was nearly out of spoons and had to start choosing what not to do.

The point was that some people start the day with fewer spoons than others, and tasks that look free to one person cost another person a lot. The idea has since spread well beyond chronic illness, to people dealing with disability, mental health, neurodivergence, burnout, and grief. It gives people words for something that's otherwise hard to explain.

When I first came across it, it reframed how I understood my own energy. A shower, for me, isn't one spoon. It's the half hour I spend standing next to the running water planning every step, the water that feels like needles, and the drained feeling afterward. A trip to the grocery store can cost me the rest of the evening.

Eventually I started building it into my planning. I keep one written agenda in one reliable place. Now, when my husband and I are planning when to do things, I can check it, see how much energy I've already committed to a day, and we can plan around that together.

What I was actually seeing in other people

When I studied successful people, I thought I was watching effort. I was probably watching how many spoons a neurotypical person has. Some of them started with more. Some had tasks that cost them less. Some had people around them handing them extra spoons without anyone noticing: support, stability, someone who understood how they worked.

The things that looked effortless in other people often were close to effortless for them. That wasn't a moral victory for them or a moral failure for me. It was a different starting balance.

Meanwhile, I was spending spoons on things nobody could see:

  • Rehearsing. I've rehearsed conversations in advance my whole life: as a kid, in college, and before work meetings.
  • Catching up in real time. I replay what people say in my head to work through it, which means I often don't have an answer until after the meeting is over.
  • Following the rules I'd been taught. In situations I don't understand, I copy the people around me, run lines I've practiced, and pull up rules I've learned. I was 21 when my mother told me it's polite to say thank you after a compliment. I've done it every time since.
  • Holding it together physically. I learned to hide toe walking and rocking because people called them out. Hiding them takes energy too.
  • Running my systems. Wallet and keys in my left pocket, phone in my right, one agenda, arriving exactly on time. Those systems are why I look organized. Without them, the difficulties show up every day.

By the time I got to the thing people could actually see, I was often already overdrawn. From the outside that looked like laziness. From the inside it felt like running on empty while everyone told me to push harder.

That pattern followed me into adulthood. I worked extremely hard to stay ahead of what was expected of me, and it paid off with a promotion at work. But the new role traded the focused work I'd been building toward since I was a teenager for meetings, interruptions, and constant shifting between topics. I was already running close to empty before the promotion. After it, I hit a wall.

Responsibility without blame

My father wasn't entirely wrong. I am responsible for my life. But responsibility and blame aren't the same thing. Blame looks backward and asks whose fault it is. Responsibility looks forward and asks what you'll do with what you have.

"The only person responsible for my failures is me" leaves no room for the spoons I didn't have, the costs no one saw, or the support that wasn't there. And some of that support really wasn't there. When I was nine, both of my teachers flagged my attention as a serious concern, and the school team recommended it be looked into. As far as I can tell from my records, that never happened. My father was wary of labels, and my mother had to fight just to get me tested for the learning disability. That means a lot of what got called "not trying" was never actually understood.

That kind of blame turns every shortfall into a character flaw, and the only fix it offers is more effort, which I didn't have to give. And for years, I was the one saying it to myself.

The version I believe now is this: I'm responsible for knowing how many spoons I have and spending them on purpose.

Spending spoons on purpose

In practice, that has meant a few things for me:

  • Counting honestly. I pay attention to what actually drains me, not what should drain me. A shower costs me more than most people would guess. So does a grocery run, a day of back-to-back meetings, or a sudden change of plans. I'm allowed to count those.
  • Planning with the people I live with. My one agenda is where I track what a day is already carrying. Before my husband and I commit to something, we look at it together. Knowing ahead of time what other people are planning that affects me saves me a lot of spoons on the day itself.
  • Choosing instead of stretching. When I'm running low, I decide what gets dropped rather than trying to do everything at 70% and calling it 110%.
  • Treating rest as a deposit. When I'm overloaded, I go to my bedroom, close the blackout curtains, put in earplugs, get under my weighted blanket, and lie in the dark for 30 to 60 minutes. That isn't time off from effort. It's what makes effort possible tomorrow.
  • Cutting the hidden costs where I can. Lights dimmed to 60% or lower. Earplugs when the house gets loud. Changing clothes the moment they start bothering me instead of tolerating it all day. Typing instead of handwriting. A line guide when I'm reading tired. Every drain I remove is a spoon I get back.

The finish line

I spent years trying to give more than I had and feeling like a failure when the math caught up with me. The kid in those school records wasn't lazy. Neither was the adult who earned a promotion and then hit a wall. I was overdrawn and didn't know how to read the statement.

You can't give 110%. You can give 100% of what you have today, and some days that's a lot and some days it isn't much. Either way it's enough, as long as you spend it on the things that matter.