Show Up For Yourself First

Turns out people who like hanging out with themselves....are fun to hang out with

Camille Pissarro, a Woman walking with a Dog, c. 1889 - 1897.

Every time I’m on a plane and hear the advice to “make sure your oxygen mask is on before helping others,” some small part of me drops into a thought cave and wanders around in a circle muttering okay but probably get the mask on the baby first.

There’s a reason we use this particular example as a metaphor for self-care — you’ll be better at helping someone with their oxygen mask if you’re not passing out — but there’s also a reason flight attendants make the announcement each and every flight. For a whole lot of us, taking care of our own needs first does not come naturally.

But if we want to be better at living in community — and cultivating friendship, which requires other people liking you and wanting to spend time with you — you have to like yourself….which includes spending time with yourself.

This idea comes across forcefully in Rachel Wilkerson Miller’s The Art of Showing Up. The book offers so many useful scripts and ideas for how to make and be there for your friends….but humbly asks you, as a reader, to spend the whole first half of the book dealing with some of your own shit before you get to the part where you start thinking about your existing or desired friendships.

It’s a compelling twist on the idea of service journalism: instead of just offering you ideas to try, it’s also underlining why you might have struggled to implement ideas in the past. The book sets forth to offer “a set of principles for taking care — a sort of code of behavior for treating yourself and other people well.” It’s worth reading that sentence again — and thinking about the idea that the code of behavior that applies to how you want to treat other people is the same code of behavior for how you should treat yourself.

Miller offers some basic characteristics of showing up (curiosity, which leads to noticing; actively learning about other people; cultivating intuition and compassion and confidence within the relationships themselves). But you know what else you have to cultivate? Self-knowledge. You can’t possibly take care of yourself,” Miller writes, “if you don’t actually know what your needs are.”

Not knowing your needs makes it hard to cultivate relationships where others will be able to understand and fulfill those needs. And if you haven’t done the work of learning how to like yourself, it makes it a lot harder to cultivate the skills necessary to show up for others. As Miller puts it, “there’s not much space for generosity, confidence, or vulnerability when you’re constantly worried about whether you have enough and are enough.”

It sounds basic, but people who like themselves are likable. Not because they’re “happy” (liking yourself and constant happiness are not the same thing) but because they’re at ease. They’ve done the work of getting to know themselves, of sitting with the parts of themselves they might sometimes dislike, of working on rejecting shame society has invited them to feel, of seeing themselves and their needs clearly. And that sort of ease? It’s magnetic.

It doesn’t necessarily make them the life of the party. It might make them someone who’s easy to be around, but it might not. I encounter it most often in women who’ve gone through the portal, but I’ve certainly seen it in others — including five-year-olds. They might have two friends, they might have two hundred. Whatever number it is, it’s the right one for them. And that, again — there’s ease there.

Miller does not suggest that getting to this point is easy. There are reasons — some societal, some highly individual — that can make it hard to like yourself. In addition to unpacking and exploring some of those reasons with a professional (in, say, therapy) Miller’s big suggestion for liking yourself more is incredibly simple: spend more time with yourself, and just yourself.

Again, this might seem counter-intuitive for a book that’s about countering flakiness in contemporary friendship, but I really think she’s on to something. When we don’t spend enough time with ourselves — our quirky, lovable selves — we don’t have the energy or wherewithal to do the (usually only slightly) hard things that makes friendship and community work.

I think of this capacity similarly to the “Body Battery” gauge on my exercise watch. Vigorous exercise, bad sleep, and stress drain it over the course of a day; I can steady that drain by taking a nap or making sure I get a good night’s sleep, but to restore that battery to “full,” I also need to take a rest from exercise altogether. Activities that center and clarify counterbalance activities that ask a lot of you (in so many ways) but also offer you a lot (also in so many ways).

What counts as centering and clarifying (or ‘asking a lot’) will be different for different types of people, but the argument remains: in order to enjoy both, you need both.

If you struggle to spend time alone, Miller suggests starting small (go on a 10 minute walk by yourself before going on a 2 mile hike; go have a coffee alone before you try going to a movie alone)….but she also gently suggests that a whole lot of us who think we’re pretty good at spending restorative time with ourselves are pretty shit at it. I recognize this in myself, a person who has ZERO problem with being alone but is often QUITE BAD at actually cultivating the sort of solitude that fortifies us to be there for others.

Being alone is different from solitude — especially now that we can usher so many different minds and inputs into our own, even while we’re ostensibly alone. I once heard Cal Newport loosely define solitude as freedom from other people’s inputs — which means that texting every five minutes on a solo walk? Not solitude. Can you find solitude while listening to a podcast or reading a book? Honestly, depends. You know it when you experience it. I think of it as a sort of flow state of solitude. Time washes over you differently. It comes when I do a puzzle, when I garden — and once there, the compulsive need to continually check for those outside inputs washes away. You can cultivate solitude on a plane full of people, and you can stymie it even when you haven’t spoken a word aloud for a week.

If you’re already really good at being alone and need some assistance with the second part of the making friends equation: here’s where I recommend actually picking up Miller’s book. There are parts of it that are definitely directed towards an audience in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, but all of it is applicable — and many people will find her specific scripts very useful.

But I also know there are people who have friends but have no time for friends and read something like this and think MUST BE NICE, HAVING TIME TO HANG OUT WITH YOURSELF AND WITH OTHERS! IN THIS ECONOMY! To that, Miller’s response to simple: do less. And yes, we’ve talked a lot about how hard it is to do less when every part of our parenting and work and health and societal lives seems to be asking us to do more. Parent more. Work more. Text more. Hobby more. Post more. Read more, cook more, buy more.

Here, again, Miller suggests offering yourself some grace — with the understanding that doing less often actually ends up meaning and being more. She speaks directly to those of us who’ve internalized the idea that if we just work harder, we can do all the things we’re supposed to do and be all the things we’re supposed to be:

“It can be hard to admit that you don’t have unlimited TIME, especially if you’ve spent years telling yourself a story about the power of self-control. But what’s the alternative? Letting yourself and other people down because you overpromised and now can’t deliver? Run yourself into the ground? Feeling constant low-level guilt that makes it impossible to enjoy what you’re actually doing? I mean sure, you could do that. But what if you just….did less?”

I’ve been thinking about this basic principle of less as more a lot lately — you can see it in this piece on “The Right Kind of Busy,” in this one on “The Absorption Vacation,” even in this one on “The Root of Over-Meeting Culture.” I am continually tinkering with my own balance, which currently feels out of whack, and I don’t know how much of that to blame on the fact that it’s winter (and El Niño making it very difficult to do my favorite grounding winter activity) and how much of it to attribute to the fact that the publishing industry is currently structured in a way that means writing a book means writing a book while still working your other job.

Sometimes I’m sheepish that I can’t follow my own best advice: that last year, at exactly this time, I was writing about a real laundry apocalypse of a week, and here I am again — with a bit less of a laundry apocalypse, but real clarity that after several months of so much, I need several months of far less. But hopefully this all feels relatable in some way, if somewhat obvious: I need to remember why I like spending time with myself — so I can remember how much I like and need to spend time with others, too. ●

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In the meantime: I took a lot of joy reading through subscribers’ reflections from earlier this week about their own praxis of solitude — how they struggle with it, how they’ve cultivated the skill, how it’s come to feel essential.

If this sort of conversation is something you’d like to have (or just read, lots of people seem to like that!) you can always join us by becoming a paid subscriber — and read the full thread here.

And for today’s discussion, we can absolutely talk more about solitude — but I’m also wondering….in this moment, how are you balancing showing up for yourself and showing up for others? What feels out of whack — and what small things feel necessary to make it go back into place? Or, historically — when have you noticed the balance is off, and how did you grapple with it? What are you still grappling with now?