About a month ago, I began meditating, as part of my self-care practice. A few days ago, I was mid-session, when my wife let me know that something was wrong with our upstairs toilet. As it turned out, there was a break in the fill valve stem. I took it upon myself to try to figure out a fix.

Any of my immediate family would tell you that I don’t have a reputation for being handy. As I started to evaluate the situation, a bunch of thoughts raced through my head. First: how am I going to figure this out? Do I have the appropriate supplies and tools? Am I going to break something and make our toilet unusable, until we call in a professional? Safe to say, I had a lot of thoughts that I was considering. However, maybe due to the meditation, I was amazingly relaxed, as I worked through the situation.

I figured that I should start with closing the water valve and disconnecting the supply hose. I had a bucket handy to catch most of the water. Unfortunately, there was some in the hose and it spilled. I felt underneath the tank and my fingers discovered a plastic nut around a threaded plastic tube that jutted out a bit. When I looked inside the tank, the narrow, fragile fill valve tube was broken through. My first thought was to figure out how to seal the break, until there were more breaks in the fill valve. Remember that I’m not a handy person.

After returning from my basement, I carried a whole new fill valve mechanism (Amazon Affiliate link). Why I had one, I don’t remember. Also, I had a pipe wrench (Amazon Affiliate link), so that I could loosen the plastic nut underneath the tank. While difficult to get a good grip on the nut, it did eventually come loose. I swiftly pulled up mechanism, but didn’t have my bucket ready to catch the little remaining water in the tank. I was very happy that the replacement mechanism had plastic nuts with little wings, so that I could manually install them without the pipe wrench. From inside the tank, I gave the mechanism a little wiggle to make sure that it was secure. Once that I felt confident, I reconnected the supply hose and flushed the toilet to water in the tank to show me any leaks. Fortunately, there were none! The only thing left was to connect the plastic chain to the flapper and test it a few times. Everything still held and still no leaks. I couldn’t believe that I pulled it off. Here and there, I would pass by the toilet to confirm my successful work because remember that I’m not a handy person.

As I wrote this post, the remember that I’m not a handy person statement stood like some mantra. When it comes to plumbing, the limit of my past experience is plunging the toilet, so this was on a whole other level. So it’s no exaggeration to say that, besides starting my site, this was one of the most challenging things that I had done in some time. When I pulled off the toilet repair, I felt empowered and it was a major shot in the arm to my confidence. I still am humble enough to know when to call someone, but I feel that this experience validated my ability to push the limit just a little bit more than before. This hearkened back to my inaugural piece, Hello World, where I talked about “defining you worst nightmare,” a concept that I found in Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek (Amazon Affiliate link). To an extent, what goes on in your head really isn’t as bad as you think. For me, this was reinforcement that I can do more than I think and I hope that this is true for you, too.

YOU CAN DO MORE THAN YOU THINK.