The Art of Showing Up

by Rachel Wilkerson Miller

  Chapter 3

  Showing Up for Your Body

  T he human body—the ol’ meatsack!!!—is beautiful and sacred and special . . . but also messy and annoying and the site of trauma and pain for a lot of people. It’s often just a hassle.*** And I have some bad news: You do, in fact, have to feed yourself (annoying), exercise (rude), sleep (fine), pee (who has the time?????), and regularly wash your body and your hair (kill me).

  Am I going to start every part of this chapter by telling you how much I hate doing said thing? I’m not not!!! When it comes to showing up for yourself, you can’t overlook the importance of your corporeal form. Think about it: It can be hard enough to get through a day even when you are meeting your basic needs. When you have a need that isn’t being met, it’s nearly impossible to think of much else. But even though you probably know that you should get eight hours of sleep every night and eat a vegetable once in a while, a lot of us aren’t doing this stuff or are struggling to do it consistently. Perhaps it’s because these tasks are so basic that it’s easy to treat them as something that just happens automatically and doesn’t require us to pay attention or make choices. And because these needs aren’t exactly sexy or fun or new, we tell ourselves that they must not really matter that much.

  But they do matter! I actually don’t believe it’s possible to show up for yourself or others long-term if you’re not taking care of yourself in the most basic, low-level ways. So let’s talk about how you can better show up for your body—taking care of it so that you feel solid and fortified, able to move through the world comfortably and handle all of the other shit you need to do, and the (fun, sexy!) stuff you want to do.

  I’m not a fan of “so easy, everyone can do it!!!” language because it overlooks the lived realities of a lot of marginalized folks as well as people with disabilities and/or health conditions. I know there will be instances in the next few chapters where my suggestions (or the scientific evidence!) simply might not be possible or make sense for you. Even if you can’t do anything about your circumstances right now (or for the foreseeable future or ever), it’s still worth knowing what a baseline level of self-care could look like if and when you’re ready. I hope this chapter will make it easier for you to recognize when you’re deviating from that baseline and help you determine what (if any!) smaller things you can do to feel a little better until you do eventually have more resources. But I also recognize that some aspects of our lives are unchanging. Ultimately, I hope that you will be kind to yourself, and remember that not showing up for yourself isn’t a personal failing; it’s a natural consequence of the outrageous cultural expectations and deeply broken system we’re all operating within.

  Going to the Doctor

  I didn’t have a regular doctor for several years in my twenties and I know I’m not the only one. Moving around repeatedly and/or changing insurance carriers every year and/or not having insurance for long stretches of time is so common—which is a shame, because going to the doctor regularly is one of the most important things you can do to show up for your body.

  If you don’t have any providers at the moment but know that you could (because you have insurance, money for co-pays, transportation, etc.), it’s absolutely worth investing the time and energy to find a doctor/dentist/optometrist sooner rather than later. It’s just so much easier to research in-network doctors and get an appointment when you are feeling well, and the fact that your need isn’t particularly urgent means you can take the time to find someone whom you actually like and trust.

  Once you have a doctor, you should actually go to said doctor. There are few things I find more frustrating than a friend with health insurance, an understanding boss, a good PTO policy, and all the privilege in the world who won’t go to a doctor when they are sick or have some other ailment. And, look, I get it: Going to the doctor is a hassle! If I have a sore throat, cough, runny nose, intense headache, swollen sinuses, and am tired as hell, I’d much rather complain about it to anyone who will listen than pick up the phone (THE!! PHONE!!), make an appointment, drag my ass across town to my doctor’s office, miss ninety minutes of work, drag my ass back across town to a pharmacy, and wait in line at said pharmacy, all to treat an infection that I (being not a doctor and all!!!) am positive will go away on its own in a few days.

  But I will still do all of the above because when I refuse to go to the doctor—again, as an insured, able-bodied person who has paid sick days—I’m not just hurting myself; I’m hurting other people. At a really basic level, I’m potentially contagious. (Fun fact: A single sneeze can fill an entire room!) But “toughing out” a sinus infection (or whatever) makes me less present, less fun to be around, and less able to show up for others. And that’s before it develops into full-on bronchitis. So if you are lucky enough to be able to go to a doctor, please actually go!

  Find Yourself a Therapist

  As my colleague Anna Borges has written,13 instead of asking, “Do I need therapy?” a better question is “How might I benefit from therapy?” Therapy isn’t just for people dealing with trauma or serious mental health issues; you can also talk to a therapist about dating woes, setting boundaries with friends, tension with your parents or siblings, job stress, low-level anxiety or sadness, and pretty much anything else that’s a source of difficulty in your life. And just because you go to therapy once, you aren’t locked into going forever; it can absolutely be a shorter-term deal.

  If you care about being emotionally intelligent, feeling your best, and having good relationships, therapy can be a great addition to your showing-up routine.

  Food

  I enjoy food and I like eating, but I find the process of feeding myself three vaguely healthy meals a day rather tiring. Meal planning, grocery shopping, going to pick up a salad for lunch, chopping vegetables, cooking, doing dishes . . . it’s all just work, and it’s not work I personally enjoy. It takes TME, and I resent that. But there’s no getting around the reality that we all do, in fact, have to eat! So finding a handful of moderately nutritious, somewhat cheap, and relatively easy-to-prepare things to eat can be a gamechanger, and is absolutely worth your while.

  Like all things self-care, feeding yourself starts with knowing yourself. The definition of “healthy” or “unhealthy” eating is incredibly personal, and I’m not here to define it for you. But I do think it’s worth defining for yourself, especially if nourishing yourself is a source of stress or something you feel like you’re struggling with. If things are going well for you overall at the moment, it’s a great time to think about this topic—because when you eventually hit a rough patch, feeding yourself can get a lot more difficult.

  To begin, spend some time really considering your preferences and priorities with regard to food. Below is a list of questions to ask yourself—answer on a scale of a lot, a little, or IDGAF.

  How much do I care about . . .

  keeping my grocery bill under a certain amount

  keeping my total food budget under a certain amount

  trying new recipes

  making sure I’m eating enough every day

  learning to cook

  using cooking/baking as a hobby

  food as function versus food as art

  packing my lunch (or breakfast, or dinner)

  eating in a way that minimizes environmental impact

  eating more/less of certain food groups (protein, fruits/veggies, etc.)

  eating certain kinds of food (fresh, local, organic, canned, frozen, shelf-stable, etc.)

  spending less than thirty minutes (or an hour) cooking each day

  spending less than a certain amount of time grocery shopping each week

  going to a particular grocery store

  eating in restaurants less and/or ordering takeout less often

  making X amount of homemade meals per week

  stocking up on healthy snacks so I don’t get hangry

  meal prepping X amount of times per week

  basically just avoid
ing getting hangry at all costs.

  Once you’ve finished this exercise, you can begin to define your approach to nourishing yourself. This step isn’t about meal planning (though you can certainly do that later) or creating food rules; it’s about establishing a lightweight philosophy that can guide your daily and weekly decisions so you feel less stress overall.

  For example, if you decide that eating five servings of fresh vegetables is a super-high priority—higher than, say, saving money on groceries, or cooking meals for yourself—then you can buy your fourteen-dollar organic kale salad every day and not feel so guilty about it. If you want to eat lots of vegetables and prepare home cooked meals but neither is a high enough priority for you to invest a lot of time or money in (or you simply don’t have the time/money), you might decide to stock up on microwave-in-the-bag frozen broccoli. The idea is to simply come up with an approach that you feel confident is the best plan for you right now (but that you can change whenever).

  It’s important that your approach to nourishing yourself reflects the current you—not some idealized version of you who goes to the farmers market every weekend, always leaves work at 5:30 (instead of 7:15), and/or is actually just Ina Garten. So put some thought into your present reality: how you actually feel before, during, and after time spent cooking/preparing/procuring food; the role food plays in your social life; how much motivation you have outside of work/school/other obligations; what other circumstances (life, health, etc.) play a role in what and how you eat; what’s working well for you at the moment; and what your biggest barriers to nourishing yourself are (if there are any). Once you better understand your current circumstances you can take better care of the version of yourself you are right now.

  Finally, remember that eating “healthy” can just be . . . eating. It doesn’t require buying three new cookbooks, scouring Pinterest for hours, going paleo, or making something from scratch every single day. It can be as simple as eating rice and beans; scrambled eggs; tuna casserole; chicken nuggets with green beans; Greek yogurt with granola and (frozen/thawed) fruit; toast and tea; or a simple quesadilla.

  Water

  Even though I roll my eyes every time a celebrity claims that drinking lots of water is the secret to being (normatively) beautiful or having flawless skin (instead of admitting that the secret is a combination of good genes and lots of money), I can acknowledge that water is, you know, good. And I can also acknowledge that on the days when I don’t drink enough water, I often get a headache and feel tired, hungry, and generally blah.

  The reason I’m mentioning the wildly clichéd tip of drinking water is because it’s a relatively easy way to show up for yourself. When you’re busy or overwhelmed or sad, drinking water (or tea or seltzer) is likely the lowest-hanging fruit on your self-care tree. And I’ve found that doing one small, good thing for myself often motivates me to do other things, or at least makes me feel less bad about the ways in which I’m still neglecting my body. If you can’t do anything else for yourself, at least try to drink some water.

  Go Pee

  My friends and I are divided on the topic of peeing. Some of them enjoy it; they see it as a moment of true privacy and relief. Meanwhile, I hate it; I think it’s a waste of time and I feel that I have better things to do. (How many books would I have written by now if I didn’t have to go pee?! A LOT.) But even though I think it’s annoying, I know that peeing is an extremely necessary form of self-care; it’s truly impossible to be present or relax or feel your best if all you can think about is your bladder.

  Now, you might be thinking, Why is she even including this? We all have to go pee at some point; it’s not like it’s optional. And that’s true! But I’ve noticed that a lot of people (and women in particular) tend to treat peeing as something that can be delayed or ignored in the interest of making other people more comfortable.

  Last summer, I was on a flight from New York to San Francisco. It’s a long flight, so it’s not unusual to need to use the restroom while in the air. I was sitting in an aisle seat; next to me was an older man who spent most of the trip dozing off; a woman around my age was in the window seat. A few hours into the flight, she got my attention and whispered to me, “Do you think it’s OK if I ask him to move so I can go to the bathroom?” I told her yes, so she nudged him, and he obliged, and we all moved on.

  It turned out that the woman and I were headed to the same destination: a weekend summer camp for adult women, where asking for what you want in life was a central theme. During one group discussion, the woman from the plane told everyone that she had nearly wet her pants on her flight to camp because she didn’t feel like she had the right to wake up her seatmate and ask him to move. It stuck in my mind because it’s such a clear example of the small ways in which we are uncomfortable showing up for ourselves.

  This story ended fine(ish????). But it doesn’t always! Consider this story my friend Hana recently told me:

  In college, I made ends meet by teaching Photoshop workshops to freshmen. I was teaching the basics on a regular schedule of two classes per night, Monday through Thursday. I usually had enough time in between sessions to run to the bathroom and grab a coffee, but sometimes an overeager photog-minor would stick around asking questions and I’d oblige. On one such night, I’d spent all of the time between classes by teaching someone about the tolerance setting on the magic wand tool, so I launched into my next class without taking a break.

  About halfway through the lesson, it became apparent that my need to piss was approaching the red zone. In my short life, I’d never seen a teacher excuse themselves from an ongoing class to use the restroom, so in my mind it was a tire iron to the shins of my credibility as a Photoshop workshop teacher to do so. Instead, I decided that I would have to let a little off the top to hold me over until the end of the session. I figured that if I maintained an air of confident authority I could pull basically anything off. So mid-lesson—behind a podium, but before God and my students—I let ’er rip. Instead of simply releasing the bare minimum required to save my kidneys from exploding, the whole situation exited my body and onto the linoleum floor of the computer lab. I was wearing a skirt so I was able to avoid any obvious stains, and the puddle stayed concealed behind the particle-board podium. But yes: I openly pissed myself in class that day because it felt like “too much of a disruption” to stop for the two minutes it would have taken to run down the hall to the bathroom. Once the class ended, I bolted for paper towels and cleaned it up thoroughly, but I felt a secret pride that I’d managed to pull it off and pass as someone who hadn’t pissed her skirt, shoes, and classroom. As if I’d risen to the call of duty and done what was needed. In reality, I pissed myself because the alternative was exhibiting what I saw as signs of weakness.

  Guys? Guys.

  I know the concept of ~listening to your body~ can feel sort of squishy at times, but peeing can be a great place to start. It’s such a basic part of being comfortable and is a fairly uncontrollable human need that you really don’t need to apologize for or feel embarrassed about. “I don’t have to go that badly; I can wait until I get home/get to the next destination” is not an ideal way to live your life. My friend group now abides by the rule “pee at the function.” Peeing at the function requires you to check in with your body and then actually listen to what it’s telling you. So go pee! (Even if you just went!!)

  Sleep

  I have occasionally been described as “horny for a good night’s sleep,” which . . . accurate. I don’t love sleeping, but I respect it. Getting enough quality sleep is the foundation of my physical and mental health; when I’m running low on sleep, it’s so much harder for me to cook and eat healthy foods, be physically active, make good decisions, and be a good friend/coworker/human.

  Because sleep is so important to me, I protect my sleep schedule fiercely. I’m willing to miss out on other fun activities to get enough sleep. I don’t watch a lot of TV, and there’s a good chance I will turn down your invitation to get
drinks on a weeknight. I know this doesn’t exactly make me sound cool. But I don’t really care—I’d much rather be energetic, relaxed, kind, and healthy than cool!

  Sleep also plays a huge role in our ability to show up for other people. Sleep scientist Matthew Walker writes in Why We Sleep that REM sleep refreshes our brain’s emotional circuits and makes it possible to understand and respond to the socioemotional signals that are near constant wherever humans are present. According to Walker, our sleep habits are a core part of the way we navigate social situations and of our overall emotional IQ. He offers two rules of thumb for assessing whether you are getting enough quality sleep:

  After you wake up in the morning, could you fall back to sleep at 10:00 or 11:00 am? If so, you are likely not getting enough sleep (or not sleeping very well).

  Can you function optimally without caffeine before noon? If not, then you are, in Walker’s words, “likely self-medicating your state of chronic sleep deprivation.” (. . . Woof.)

  If you know you’re not getting enough sleep or sleeping particularly well, there are plenty of things you can do: watch your caffeine intake, drink less alcohol (especially in the evening), make sure you give yourself two to three hours between exercising and bedtime, lock your phone in a box at sundown every night, and so on. In my experience, the most important thing is to decide that sleep matters to you. It’s really hard to, say, get up early on weekends, leave a party where your crush is hanging out, or consistently put down your phone and pick up your journal if you don’t really think it’s important that you do. And sleep might not be more important than those things are to you! The point is to figure out how much sleep matters to you—and to understand where that value intersects with the bigger issues that can interfere with sleep (like anxiety, medications, unchanging work/school schedules, being a night owl)—and then build a routine and a plan from there. It wasn’t until I admitted to myself that I was sacrificing something undeniably important to my health and well-being to do a bunch of things that I didn’t really value that I was able to implement the tips above.