The letter is candid in a way that advice columns rarely get to be. A reader tells Eleanor Gordon-Smith that her life is going well by every measure she cares about — a rewarding job, “stellar progress” toward a graduate degree, incredible friends and community, a reconnection with estranged family — and that she is nonetheless “drowning in shame” over what falls to the wayside. Countless missed doctors’ appointments. Plates expired for almost a year. Apologies to friends she hasn’t seen in months, a partner and parents who say they don’t see her enough, a stack of overdue forms that makes her “feel so irresponsible, as if I’m the only adult alive who can’t seem to take care of business.” Her commute includes dodging police cars, because she keeps running out of time to get to the DMV.
Gordon-Smith starts with the clue in the letter rather than the complaint. Part of what makes the reader’s situation feel shameful is that the demands she’s failing at arrive in one undifferentiated stream: “requests from people you love go in the same mental bucket as the DMV.” Which is worth saying plainly, because she is nowhere near alone. “There should be an amnesty each year when we confess our administrative stuff-ups so we wouldn’t feel so alone,” Gordon-Smith writes. “You wouldn’t believe what’s out there. Some of us are at the more ultraviolet end of the spectrum, admittedly. But there are leagues upon leagues of us who understand this feeling all too painfully well. Ask any tax agent.”
Two different problems wearing the same coat
The piece then does something more useful than reassurance. Before any strategies, it separates two conditions that look identical from the outside: a time problem and a bandwidth problem.
If the problem is time, the answers are logistical — the tasks have to consume less of it. Outsource, batch, ban perfectionism, use a timer, say no. The social half matters as much as the administrative half: the people asking for more time need to understand how little there is. “If you’re the only one who knows how many plates you’re spinning, you’re the only one who knows how fair or unfair these requests are.”
If the problem is bandwidth, the arithmetic changes. Minutes may be technically available and still unusable, because each call or request “requires self-steeling and psychic warm-up” and leaves the person flattened afterwards. Gordon-Smith’s illustration is a triathlete crossing the line: “You might as well tell me, as I collapse across the triathlon finish, that there’s time to run another 10km. Yeah, sure. But I can’t. I’m in no condition to use that time to that end.” Her suspicion is that for most people overwhelm is at least partly this second thing, and that it is checkable — a time audit will show where the hours actually go.
The mismatch, not the laziness
Bandwidth problems announce themselves as disagreements about difficulty. Other people reason that the to-do item “would take 20 minutes,” which is a bit like asking why you haven’t yet called an estranged lover to bury the hatchet, or confronted your childhood bully, since either would take 20 minutes too. Gordon-Smith’s formulation: “The time is not the issue, the effect on my nervous system is.”
That reframing matters because it points away from the standard remedy. “I am not saying this could be solved by working harder or ‘making time,’” she writes. “It’s precisely the opposite. If time itself doesn’t help, what you ultimately need are ways for these things to feel less like horrific burdens, so there’s less reason to avoid them and less exhaustion from encountering them.”
What would make them feel less like burdens depends on why they feel so bad to begin with, and she offers four candidates rather than one. It could be competence — “I’m not sure I can do this, and I hate how it feels to be bumbling.” It could be the fear that people will always want more, so that “I’d like to see you!” lands as “I want something from you, and after that I’ll want more,” a request for time arriving as the threat of being consumed. It could be perfectionism: “I’d rather not do this at all than do it only to the level it can be done quickly.” Or it could be screen overload, when work and admin and socialising all arrive on the same demand-communicating device.
Along the way Gordon-Smith raises ADHD as worth looking into — with the reminder that management doesn’t have to mean medication, and can mean offloading executive function onto the physical rather than the digital environment: a timer you can see, a whiteboard calendar you have to walk past. Underneath all of it is a simpler correction. The reader isn’t short on character; she is short on a resource she has been taught to treat as a character fault. “We can make such thickets of shame,” Gordon-Smith writes. “Understanding the specifics of your overwhelm may feel like yet another task but, once you do, the rest may come easier.”