Not every dropped responsibility shatters when it hits the floor

Young adult author Jennifer Lynn Barnes once described attending a Q&A with novelist Nora Roberts, where someone asked how to balance writing with raising children. Roberts's answer, as Barnes recounted it, was that the key to juggling is knowing that some of the balls in the air are made of plastic, and some are made of glass.

Davis borrows that image directly for thinking about care tasks during hard seasons. Glass balls are the things that shatter if you drop them: feeding yourself, caring for a child or a pet, taking medication, addressing a mental health crisis. Plastic balls bounce: recycling, matching socks, an immaculate car, perfectly balanced meals. Both categories can matter. But when capacity runs out, Davis argues, the entire point is to let the plastic balls fall so your hands stay on the glass ones.

She applies this literally to her own life. Brushing her teeth became, in her words, her personal executive functioning kryptonite after her second daughter was born during lockdown, compounded by postpartum depression and undiagnosed ADHD. Eventually she ordered a box of pre-pasted, disposable toothbrushes and kept them by the door, using one whenever she passed by rather than trying to force the old ritual back into a day that no longer had room for it. She felt guilty about the plastic waste, until her friend Imani Barbarin, a disability advocate, pointed out that healthy people are never shamed for using disposable masks or prescription bottles, but disabled people get shamed constantly for using exactly the same kind of plastic to stay functional. You need what you need, Barbarin told her.

Davis's broader point is that using something to keep yourself functioning is not the same as wasting it. A dripping faucet left unfixed for years is waste. A paper plate used because otherwise you wouldn't eat at all is not. When capacity is genuinely limited, deciding in advance which balls are glass and which are plastic means you stop losing sleep over the recycling and start protecting the things that would actually break if you let them fall.

Write down everything currently competing for your time and energy, from feeding yourself to sorting the recycling to keeping a spotless car. Go through the list and mark which items would cause real, lasting harm if you dropped them entirely this week: caring for a dependent, medication, basic meals. Then mark the rest as plastic: things that matter in general but would simply bounce if set down for a while. When your capacity is genuinely low, let the plastic balls fall on purpose instead of exhausting yourself trying to keep everything in the air. Keep your hands exactly where they need to be, on the glass.