The Art of Showing Up

by Rachel Wilkerson Miller

  Twitter

  Core reason I use this app: To catch up on important news; to find interesting things to read

  Problem: I have to wade through a sea of clickbait, drama, Nazi propaganda, and memes that make me feel old.

  Alternatives: I could read the a news website at a set time each day, read the physical paper, or watch the morning and evening news. I could sign up for newsletters, go directly to my favorite users’ profiles to get their recommendations, or visit my favorite websites to see what’s new.

  Any app

  Core reason I use this app: To zone out

  Problem: I’m zoning out for too long or too often, and I feel guilty because I’m not getting to do the other things I care about and want to do.

  Alternatives: I could recognize that we all need to zone out every once in a while and not be so hard on myself. I could also set time limits around my zone-out times, make that the reward for doing other things, or experiment with other forms of zoning out that feel healthier or more contained.

  Of course, some of these alternatives might seem impossible—for example, calling a friend or writing them an email takes time, which you may not feel like you have. But perhaps you would have the time if you weren’t spending so much time scrolling through inane bullshit on your apps under the guise of connecting with friends. Instead of spending an hour a day on Facebook, you could have twenty-minute phone calls with two or three different friends—which will definitely feel more meaningful.

  Consider, at the very least, setting boundaries around your app usage. Here are some that I’ve found personally helpful that you might want to try.

  Don’t check your phone in bed in the morning. Try keeping your phone on Do Not Disturb (or airplane mode) overnight and don’t open any apps or respond to any texts until you’re out of bed and mostly ready for work.

  Hide apps so they aren’t on your home screen. I now have to swipe through several screens to open Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and I’ve been shocked by how much my app usage has decreased. Turns out, I was opening these mostly out of habit; I didn’t miss them once I couldn’t see them.

  Delete social media apps from your phone and force yourself to use the desktop version instead.

  Replace your go-to “I’m bored” social media app on your home screen with an e-reader app.

  Turn off all notifications except phone calls (and maybe messaging). That means no alerts for coupons, internet quizzes, @-mentions, anything.

  Turn off all notification sounds. You can make your main texting sound “none” but give VIPs (like your mom) their own personal text tones, so you can respond to their messages quickly. Then you can keep your phone’s volume on (so you won’t miss actual calls) but your phone won’t be whizzing and banging every twenty seconds when the group chat starts popping off.

  Treat your phone like a landline and only use it in a certain spot in a certain room.

  Set boundaries around where/when/how you’ll check apps—and when you won’t. (For example, I don’t look at Twitter on Sunday mornings because Sunday morning Twitter is truly the worst, and starting my day there is a recipe for Sunday Scaries.)

  Get your news fix from podcasts, television, or physical newspapers (basically, any form of media that doesn’t encourage you to read comments or click other links).

  Take a thirty-day break from one of your apps (or all of them) and see how you feel at the end of it. You might find you don’t miss it.

  Texting/Messaging

  I have to be honest: I love messaging—texting, Slack, all of it. It’s convenient and fun and allows me to stay in touch with people, particularly long-distance friends.

  That said, I also recognize the ways it has been a problem in my life. It’s terrible for my wrists, neck, back, and eyes. Knowing I can stop what I’m doing at pretty much any moment to text a friend makes me far less present in my daily life. In many cases, it’s simply made me too available—to people I really shouldn’t be that available to. By the time I realize this, it’s too late. I’m trapped in a cycle where I feel like I have to respond, and quickly—because I’ve given the impression that I will—and that if I don’t, they’ll be disappointed. As my friend Gyan once put it, “Replying to people feels like a full-time job.”

  Messaging isn’t all bad; in fact, a lot of it is great! I genuinely treasure the conversations I have with friends via text. But I can’t deny the fact that having several side conversations during the day—some of which were part of my job, but many of which were not—had a negative effect on my creative output and how I felt overall. It’s shockingly easy to expend a lot of mental and creative energy on this steady drip-drip-drip of words all day, which can leave you feeling quite drained, even though you’re not actually producing anything.

  Messaging made it harder for me to do the things I actually wanted to do (read, engage in hobbies, not accidentally step into traffic); felt like a huge obligation; and was skewing my ratio of showing up for others versus showing up for myself too far toward other people. And every time I’d pick up my phone to respond to a message, I’d inevitably waste more time looking at other dumb apps I didn’t actually care about.

  So I finally set boundaries around messaging. It turned out that most people didn’t really care if I responded to a message in five minutes or five hours. And I realized that the people who hassled me about it were less interested in talking to me and more interested in having a responsive, friend-shaped receptacle where they could unleash their every thought whenever they felt like it. And that felt really shitty, and not like a friendship at all.

  If messaging is stressing you out or interfering with your goals and your life, it’s time to establish new boundaries and reclaim your attention. Here are some questions to think about as you examine your current messaging habits and consider how you ended up here.

  How often are you the one starting text conversations? Do you notice any patterns about when you typically start them or the mood you tend to be in?

  What is the substance of the conversations? Is it personal and meaningful? Mostly memes and “haha cool”s?

  How balanced are the conversations? Is one person contributing a lot more from either a quantity or a quality standpoint?

  Did you fall into this habit at a different time in your life (e.g., when you were still in school, when you had a boring job you hated, before you got a hobby, when you were depressed or lonely)?

  When do you feel like these conversations energize you? When do they leave you feeling negative or drained?

  Do you often find yourself sending the same exact messages to a bunch of different friends? Do you ever feel like your friends are doing that to you?

  What need is frequent messaging meeting in your life? Is it rooted in boredom, a desire for intimacy, a lack of IRL connections, a desire to write/speak on topics that matter to you, etc.?

  Does messaging allow you to avoid something else in your life (e.g., your job, your partner, your family, or making new friends)?

  How might you feel if you changed something about your current messaging habits?

  Is there another form of communication or a communication schedule that would ultimately serve the same needs but wouldn’t leave you feeling as icky?

  Once you have a better understanding of how you’ve gotten to this point, you can start to think about what role you’d like messaging to play in your life going forward, and how to communicate that to your people.

  With most people in your life, it’ll likely be fairly easy to reset the conversational cadence. You can just respond slower and see what happens (it’ll likely be fine), or give yourself set times each day (or week) where you’ll be more on. In this case, the real work will be letting go of the idea that you have to be super responsive 24/7.

  When it comes to the people who have come to expect immediate replies from you, or who get upset if they don’t hear from you within thirty minutes, you may need to have a conversation to reset your boundari
es.

  What to say

  “I’ve realized that I need to be more focused during the day, which means I can’t keep up with our normal messaging anymore.”

  “I love our chats, but I’m so busy right now, I can’t deny that the frequency is keeping me from getting [work/studying/other obligations] done.”

  “I love talking to you but I’ve realized that [being on my phone so much/texting with friends all day/chatting up until bedtime] is really interfering with my [productivity/big life goals/sleep schedule].”

  You could also add:

  “Trust me, I’d much rather be chatting with you all the time, but I recognize that I need to suck it up and do this.” And then: “So I’m going to [turn off messaging notifications entirely/delete FB Messenger from my phone/be completely unavailable during the day].”

  And if—if!!!!!!—you want to, you can say something like:

  “But I love talking to you and would love to catch up [once a week on a Skype call/via phone while commuting home/at our regularly scheduled coffee date].”

  Try not to overthink it or bend over backward apologizing; what you’re asking for here is reasonable, and you don’t need to justify your decision or argue about whether this is fair. They might be disappointed, but no relationship guarantees any of us the right to another person’s attention and energy whenever we feel like chatting.

  Then—and this is huge—you have to actually do it. This part can be hard, particularly if the person continues to message you as if nothing has changed. (In my experience, a lot of people will do just that, often framing it as, “I know you’re offline so I’m just leaving this here for you to read later.”) It’s not just about asking them to change their behavior or adjust their expectations; it’s about training yourself to be OK with unread messages and those little red notification bubbles and the idea of disappointing people. If you don’t hold firm, you’re teaching them that your boundaries don’t actually matter.

  Remember that texting is a relatively modern invention, and so is the expectation of constant availability. As Andrea Bonior says of ye olden days before smartphones, “People simply had no expectation that if they had a thought while they were driving across a bridge, they’d be able to share it with their friend Shirley right that very second.”11

  Finally, consider that if you have to do this much work to enforce boundaries around messaging, or spend a ton of time and energy brainstorming creative solutions to appease a person who wants to message you constantly, it might be a sign of a bigger problem with the relationship. Constant availability isn’t a given in friendships, particularly as people get older, and as partners, children, and other priorities begin to take precedence. (And even with a romantic partner or a child or parent, you’re still allowed to say, “This is too much.”) In my experience, people who aren’t great with respecting my boundaries and needs when it comes to communication aren’t great at respecting my boundaries in general. So should you find yourself in this situation, or if this advice really resonated with you, be sure to take an honest look at the relationship as a whole.

  Monotasking

  Since we’re talking about how to have more time and energy, I’ll share one of the biggest ways I practice showing up for myself: by monotasking.

  First, some definitions: Monotasking is focusing on a single task for a set period of time. The opposite of monotasking is what experts call switch-tasking. Switch-tasking is moving between cognitively demanding tasks, like checking your email, updating a spreadsheet, responding to IMs, and shopping online. And it doesn’t just happen at work. You could switch-task by toggling between Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and texting, or by going from folding laundry to responding to a DM to changing the channel on the TV to Googling the answer to a Jeopardy! question. Meanwhile, background-tasking is doing something like listening to a podcast while you clean your bathroom, and isn’t quite as big a deal. (It does matter when it comes to solitude, though—see How to Be Alone.)

  Like a lot of people, I used to switch-task pretty much nonstop. I dabbled in monotasking for a bit, but I didn’t really prioritize it across all areas of my life until I read the management book The Mind of the Leader, in which the authors write that switch-tasking makes us “masters of everything that is irrelevant.”12 YIKES. But also . . . true? Experts agree that switch-tasking simply doesn’t work. When your attention is divided across tasks and tabs and devices and conversations, you end up feeling less whole. It left me feeling drained and scattered, and the scientific evidence and my own lived experience told me that I wasn’t actually getting shit done this way.

  Even when you know switch-tasking is bad, it’s still so damn appealing. For starters, humans are basically hardwired to do it. In the moment, all of those pings and tasks can make us feel important and special and popular. And not being available to everyone all the time can leave us feeling guilty. I don’t know about you, but I like being responsive; it makes me feel like a good, attentive friend. But the reality is, I’m not showing up for the people I’m with, the person who is pinging me, or myself when I’m switch-tasking. So I gave it up.

  Monotasking takes practice; if you’re used to switch-tasking, focusing on a single task will feel kind of stressful at first. I started small: I stopped texting while I walked. Then I put my phone in Do Not Disturb mode while cooking and focused entirely on the food. I started going offline during the day at work. Unsurprisingly, I got so much done this way—tasks that I thought would take me forty-five minutes only took me twenty. And I just felt better.

  Do I stick with monotasking all the time? I do not. It’s hard! But monotasking is now something I think of like exercising or eating healthy: a habit I need to stick with most of the time as a way of showing up.

  Stop Hurting Your Own Feelings

  To hurt your own feelings is to engage in completely optional behaviors that you know make you feel bad. And the optional part really is key. This isn’t about the situations in which you can’t avoid terrible or annoying or abusive people; it’s about the situations when you know the “block” and “mute” and “unfollow” and “log off” buttons exist, and you’re simply refusing to use them.

  Hurting your own feelings very often happens online. The posts, photos, videos, and comments in our everyday feeds can fuel rage, hopelessness, fear, or all of the above. Our apps fuel envy, which is often behind the feelings of anxiety, inferiority, unease, irritation, and anger that follow a 30-minute jaunt through Facebook, Instagram, and/or Twitter. (Hell, I’ll even acknowledge the existence of LinkedIn for this one! Job envy is real!)

  Not hurting your own feelings online means knocking off the social media behaviors that you know make you feel bad or are simply a waste of time. Think: looking at your ex’s photos; looking at your ex’s new partner’s photos; looking at photos of your ex’s new partner’s family and friends; posting selfies just to see who likes/responds; following an Instagram influencer or colleague whose posts make you feel bad; and following anyone you think is extremely ignorant or who you wish would shut the fuck up and log off. Like, I get it but also: You shut the fuck up and log off!!!

  Not hurting your own feelings means making the choice to stop spending valuable time and energy pissing yourself off. Because whether it’s happening in the real world (like at work) or on social media, continuing to pay close attention to people who have hurt you or who you don’t like or whose life updates leave you feeling A Way does cost you. For example, every time you see their posts or hear mention of them, you’re going to think about all the reasons they suck (or feel like you suck), and those negative feelings are going to take up space in your brain and your day, even if you’re not directly interacting with them. And who is that hurting? Hint: not them!!!!

  If you’ve already decided that someone upsets you, you don’t need more evidence. And if you continue to look for more proof of this person’s shittiness (or their “unearned” success) so you can nurture your grievances, you’ll find yo
urself trapped in a negative feedback loop that . . . does what exactly? Maybe you feel powerful or self-righteous for a moment, but that feeling never really lasts. So not hurting your own feelings is saying, “This person upsets me for [insert reason]. There is no new information I could possibly glean from following them/interacting with them and then stewing over or yelling about the most recent thing they did.” When you know, unequivocally, that someone sucks, all the additional evidence does is make you feel worse.

  In other instances, hurting your own feelings might look like testing other people and waiting for them to disappoint you—so you can then be angry about it. It’s asking to be included in a work meeting you know you aren’t going to be included in. It’s trying to date people who are definitely unavailable. It’s refusing to share what you want or need, and then lashing out when you don’t get it. Not hurting your own feelings means replacing those behaviors with ones that make you feel affirmed and whole, like you’re making meaningful progress toward the life you want to live, or that you’re simply good enough as you are.

  We hurt our own feelings for the same reason we pick at scabs—because even though it isn’t exactly positive behavior, it provides a rush that can, in the moment, feel . . . well, not good, but something sort of like good. Hurting your own feelings can make you feel like you’re solving a problem (even though you’re not) and allows you to believe for the moment that you’re in control. After a breakup, it’s a way to continue giving the person attention even though you aren’t really allowed to give them attention anymore. And when we’re feeling sad or disappointed or worried or vulnerable, it’s so much easier to assign blame to other people—or to simply distract ourselves—than it is to name all of our negative and uncomfortable feelings, to simply sit with them, or to admit we’re powerless to change the situation.

  Making space is ultimately about protecting yourself—your time, and also your heart—and not hurting your own feelings is a way to remind yourself that you have some agency. Like, there are enough cruel people in the world who are more than happy to hurt us; we really don’t need to do that work for them.