Showing Up
Greetings, nerdy word community. I’m sure you’ve been longing for your dose of occasionally witty grammar posts. Today will disappoint because I’m just not feeling all that ‘grammarly.’ So instead, the topic? Showing up.
You ever get somewhere and just think, “whew… I made it!” as you slide your butt into the seat? Whether it actually was touch-and-go is almost irrelevant. Harrowing journey or no, the point is that you believed it was or could have been given the circumstances.
Maybe those circumstances were completely out of your control. It happens. The car won’t start, a tire is flat, the toilet overflowed, the milk went sour, the bus never showed, traffic was ridiculous… the list goes on and on. What are you thinking? How do you react? Here are two possibilities.
Option A: Honestly, it doesn’t even matter that you made it to where you needed to go. The day has sucked and it’s only just begun. You’re on edge and expecting the worst.
Option B: The fact that you made it where you needed to go is both amazing and exhausting. You recognize you’re grateful to have survived, and you’re pretty sure the day will turn around. Plus, you’ve got some great stories to tell your co-worker about the morning shenanigans.
Or, maybe the circumstances are technically “within your control,” but you’re struggling. You barely slept last night, your head hurts, you’re feeling anxious, you got snippy with your husband before he left for his trip, you’re scared about the upcoming meeting, you’re worried you’ll have to bail on dinner tonight with a friend because you’re exhausted. You get the idea. So you make it to where you need to be, you slip into that seat, and:
Option A: You realize that while it’s a small miracle you “showed up,” the day hasn’t even begun yet. All you did was make it from the bench to home plate. You have no battle stories palatable enough to tell, even though you’ve fought about 100 battles just to make it to where you are. You’re such a mess. You berate yourself and/or take it out on whoever’s around you.
Option B: Grab your security blanket coffee. You sip. You sit. You pop an Advil. You tell your co-worker you need a minute. You feel the weight of all the morning’s crap. As your breath slows, your racing thoughts become a bit clearer. It boils down to the fact that you’re not sure how you’re going to make it through the day. You tell yourself you don’t need to know right now, that you’ll take it an hour at a time, check back in with yourself at lunch and reevaluate.
What have you showed up for today? Your job? A meeting? Your kid? The gym? Your partner? A doctor’s appointment? Did you get there by the skin of your teeth? Was it one of those days? Or were you feeling pretty centered?
How do you feel about how you showed up? If you’re figuratively scratching your head, what I mean is were you hurried, harried and just checking a box? Were you present, grounded, and participatory? Did you want to lash out at anyone near you? Did you give anyone a compliment or have a cool thought about how you valued or appreciated them? Did you walk away feeling unseen or unheard or hurt?
Did you notice at any point along this morning’s journey that you had a choice how to interpret something, how to feel about it, and how to react? I’m asking because I don’t often consciously notice that I’m standing at a crossroads with a legitimate option. My head jumps to conclusions about what my gut is telling me and I don’t know that I can make a choice.
In the day-to-day, I often feel (and fall) victim to my own narrative. For example, it’s 7:18am. Not being a morning person, the fact that I am clean, dressed, out in public with a touch of makeup, and mostly-functioning is something which I’m quite proud of. Yes, I realize this is a privilege and that I may have just caused a ground swell of eye rolls. That’s OK. For right now, we’re not playing the compare game that’s so prevalent in our society; I’m just going to be unapologetically honest.
I’m at my writing meet-up group this morning for the first time in a few weeks. My ass is on this cold metal stool, I’m surrounded by other folks pecking away at their laptops (or trying to) and I’m grateful to just be here. Breathe in, sigh out. Gratitude, baby! “Whew, I made it.”
But... there’s also another voice in my head vying for attention. “What are going to do now, hotshot?” It’s much more accusatory. It’s an excellent mocker. Here are a few choice tidbits for you of what it’s saying:
Congratulations, you big loaf. If this were the gym, you wouldn’t get any points for walking through the door and sitting on your fat ass. Do something!
You think it’s enough just to show up somewhere you’re supposed to be? Sad.
The whole point of this meet-up is to PRODUCE (blogs) and you haven’t done that in weeks for this business you so expertly run.
Way to pat yourself on the back for the participation trophy you just gave yourself for showing up to a non-paying gig at an entirely appropriate time in the morning.
You don’t even have anything to say, you big faker.
So I think you get the idea. This voice is mean. But it also speaks some truth. And in my opinion, these are some of the trickiest messages to contend with because I can’t just flat out say in response, “that’s a big lie, shut up.” I think the question becomes how do I parse out the simple truth from the vitriolic spewing? Where is the line between being nice to myself, giving myself grace, being OK with where I’m at and what I’m feeling… and… deleterious coddling?
(Also, confession: in the last two sentences I just spit out words that I had to look up with the MS Word thesaurus to see if they meant what I intended them to. Vocabulary is a weird thing. If I were speaking, my brain would never access those words. When I’m writing, access seems to open up to stuff I didn’t even know was there.)
While still in the 7 o’clock hour, I am recognizing the choice in front of me. Is it OK just to be grateful and proud that I “showed up,” or, do I need to ride the crazy train of productivity to prove my worth? Do I choose gratitude and offer myself some grace, or do I relentlessly push myself forward?
Sometimes I can sort out the whole message conundrum I’m describing. Sometimes I even land in a healthy place – accepting where I’m at and acknowledging there’s always more work to be done. More often than not though, I don’t engage. I simply shut the voices down with my ‘mighty will power ‘and try to get busy “doing the work” in the hopes that I can either move past the messages and forget, or, somehow prove the mean voice wrong.
Sometimes avoidance is absolutely necessary. You can’t exactly spend the first three hours of work every day working through your own shit and neglecting why you’re there and what you’re being paid to do. Avoidance is a way to cope, but… at some point you have to deal, right? You can’t just “la-la-la-la” your way through life. We all know it catches up to us and bites us in the ass.
Perhaps, like everything, it’s in the moderation—deciding when to challenge yourself (and how to do it kindly) and when to truly be grateful you simply showed up. Period end of story.
And perhaps in pitting grace against challenge, I’m creating a false dichotomy… making them mutually exclusive when they really aren’t. In so doing, I’m minimizing and distorting grace to something it’s not. Grace isn’t laziness. Grace is a beautiful thing. It’s a gift and a mercy all in itself. It’s not grace or challenge; they co-exist in tension and balance. Maybe it’s about recognizing I hold them both with open palms.
Choose to be grateful. Choose to be driven. Choose to be human. Be kind. Know that you have the power to choose and that you’re worth the choice. And know that tomorrow offers the possibility of a different choice if today bit the big one.
The truth beyond truth—the truth with a capital T that bows down to no single or collective voice—is that we have so much power to write and rewrite our immediate narrative. Stand in that truth and write well, fellow humans.
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Blog Photo Credit: https://dannipomplun.com/2016/02/01/just-show-up/