The Art of Showing Up

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!!)

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:

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.

I can’t remember the last time I took a shower without complaining about the fact that I had to take a shower. I don’t really like water or being wet, and I just find showers . . . boring. If you, like me, think showers can go kick rocks, I have some good news for you: You probably don’t need to shower quite as much as you think you do! Experts agree that Americans over-bathe.14 Frequent showering may actually be doing more harm than good, as it can wash away the good bacteria that naturally exist on our skin, dry out and irritate skin, and introduce small cracks that put us at a higher risk of infection. So if you’re a shower hater, you can probably skip the daily shower and take one every two or three days—which is something! (And if showering every two or three days is still kind of a struggle, I have some tips in Chapter 5 that might help.)

I love safety and I will not apologize for it. So many “silly” and preventable accidents can seriously derail your life (or just cost you a lot of TME), and showing up for your body means doing the basics to protect it. Here are some small things you should be doing to stay injury-free.

Don’t even think about falling asleep or leaving your home with a candle burning.

Literally all the time. Including when you’re in taxis or ride-hails. (The number of people who don’t buckle up when they get into a cab never fails to shock me!) The fact that you’re just making a short trip in a residential area or in slow city traffic isn’t an excuse; according to the US Department of Transportation, “Seemingly routine trips can be deceptively dangerous. Most fatal crashes happen within 25 miles from home and at speeds of less than 40 mph.” So yeah, I’m definitely that person who won’t get into a car if there aren’t enough seats/seat belts for everyone.

Surprise: I don’t hate exercising! (I do hate that it necessitates more frequent showering.) Finding a way to move your body that you enjoy—or can simply tolerate—enough to do regularly can be a big aspect of showing up for yourself. According to the Mayo Clinic, 150 minutes (two and a half hours) of moderate exercise a week can help you feel less stressed, less depressed, and less anxious; it can help you sleep better, make you feel better, improve your cognitive function, and lower your risk of death from all causes. That said, exercising can be a big source of shame, anxiety, pain, and stress, or it may simply be low on your list of priorities. Opting out of exercise might actually be how you need to show up for yourself, and that’s OK, too. Ultimately, your relationship with exercise and your specific exercise routine (or lack thereof) is yours to define, based on your priorities, values, health history, abilities, current circumstances, and lived reality.

I lost a lot of TME in the war against my body over the years, and I’ll never get it back. The only thing I can do about it is forgive myself and try to do better going forward. When it comes to exercise and showing up, here are some of the lessons I wish I’d learned sooner.

These days, I know I’m genuinely showing up for myself through exercise if said exercise is ultimately creating more space—not less—for all of the other good things in life I want to experience.

The 2 x 2 x 2 Approach

Anne Poirier recommends a 2 x 2 x 2 approach to movement and exercise to her clients. Here’s how it works.

Two days of being mobile.

Twice a week, spend some time moving through the world, in whatever form of mobility is your default. Poirier recommends walking/being mobile because it “promotes independence,” a sentiment I love. Note: There’s no set duration for this—you can do it for ten minutes, or stop to rest five times throughout.

Two days of play.

Twice a week, do something you like to do, that brings you joy and pleasure. It could be walking around a museum or park, playing tag, dancing, or splashing around in the pool. Again, it’s not timed and there are no real rules.

Two days a week of functional movement.

Twice a week, do something related to that reason for exercising you established earlier. So if your goal is to be more flexible so you can get down on the floor and play with your kids, your functional movement might be stretching or doing yoga. If you want to be able to be on your feet all day without getting tired, maybe this is when you power walk.

The 2 x 2 x 2 approach invites you to move most days, but that movement is less about how you look, or outdated “rules” about what exercise should look like, and more about living a more comfortable, more joyful life.

I am happy to see that after a decade messaging around loving your body—messaging that is quite often delivered by brands and/or conventionally attractive women—the term “body neutrality” is on the rise. Because here’s the thing: Loving your body is a big ask, particularly if your body doesn’t conform to established standards, or if your body has betrayed you in some way. Body positivity sounds great in theory—but given how hostile society can be to people who look or are different, it’s understandable to feel insecure, and to wish your body were different.

Anne Poirier says that body image is a spectrum, and that body neutrality can be seen as a resting place within all the noise—the noise of self-hatred, and the noise of “you need to love yourself.” She says it can be particularly helpful if the idea of loving your body is so far from where you currently are that you can’t really envision ever reaching that point.

Body neutrality invites you to focus on what you can do with your body instead of what it looks like. (And if your body can’t do as much as you’d like it to, or as much as it once did, Poirier suggests celebrating what it can do while also allowing yourself to grieve what it cannot.) If you’re trying to reach body neutrality, here are some practical exercises that Poirier recommends.

The goal with this exercise is to develop a better relationship with yourself. Noticing, acknowledging, and maybe even befriending your body as it is is one of the best things you can do to show up for yourself.

If you’re trying to take better care of yourself, it’s worth documenting what you’re doing and how you’re feeling. There are many different ways to do this, but my go-to is a monthly habit tracker in my journal. I’m partial to a graph format with the dates written on one axis and the items you’re tracking on the other. You can create something like this in your own journal or through a good old-fashioned spreadsheet.

But there’s no singular “right” way to track your habits! You could just as easily use an app or a digital or paper calendar. And if the monthly view seems overwhelming, time-consuming, or like it might stress you out more, try tracking at the daily or weekly level instead.

Regardless of your setup, here are the big categories to think about when creating a habit tracker.15

This might include things like migraines, headaches, nausea, bloating, sleepiness, insomnia, hunger/appetite, periods, hangovers, crying, and breakouts.

Some moods you could make space for: tired, irritable, sad, depressed, angry, sensitive, distracted, happy, content. You may also want to note any days where you experienced conflict (with, say, a housemate, partner, or family member).

This might include medications, hours of sleep, hours napping, servings of alcohol, servings of caffeine, TV/streaming services, minutes of exercise (and/or particular types of exercise), showering, teeth brushing, chores (like making the bed), phone use (or certain app usage), time spent in nature, socializing, religious activities, and conversations with difficult people.

As my colleague Anna Borges has reported, checking boxes when you do something healthy for yourself can be motivating, but the purpose of tracking your habits isn’t really to achieve your goals . . . it’s to be able to see patterns. When everything is in a single place, you can start to make connections between, say, drinking alcohol and feeling sad, or getting migraines and getting your period. A tracker also helps you notice frequency. It’s remarkably easy to tell yourself something isn’t a “serious” problem when you don’t have the data in front of you; documenting your habits gives you a fuller, more accurate picture of yourself and your life.

If you do decide to attach some goals to these habits, make sure they are realistic and attainable. Otherwise, you might find yourself getting discouraged if you “mess up” early on in the month. The tracker should be less about achievement and more about collecting information. Think of it as a tool that can teach you something about yourself and help you take better care of yourself.

Six Things That Are Definitely Self-Care

Eating lunch alone at work
Laughing at your own jokes
Masturbating
Flossing
Blocking and reporting trolls
Sitting on your bed for an hour in your towel, doing nothing*

* Unless doing this means you’re running late for a function or event and thus will feel extremely stressed once you get up and start getting ready

I have been writing for a decade about how to live your best life—and reading about it for even longer—so I’m extremely familiar with the suggestions that show up in every single article and self-help book and Reddit thread, regardless of what your specific problem is. Whether you’re dealing with a breakup or anxiety or unemployment or bad body image or burnout, the same solutions show up again and again: Exercise. Make sure you’re getting enough sleep. Don’t drink too much. Meditate. Practice gratitude. Take a vacation. Get off social media. Volunteer. Take your meds. Go to therapy.

If you’re the one in need of a solution, this advice can feel incredibly disappointing. It’s so frustrating to be told that you just need to start working out when your life is in goddamn shambles. Like, Don’t you think I’ve thought of that????

But here’s what I’ve noticed again and again, in both myself and my friends: Just because we’ve thought of it doesn’t mean we’ve actually fully considered it, or that we’ve made a good-faith attempt to do it. And so often, the reason we aren’t trying it is because the advice feels simple. Yes, we want to feel better, but we also like thinking of ourselves as complicated creatures whose unique problems couldn’t possibly be solved by something as obvious as going to the gym or making a gratitude list every night. We want to believe that our problems are too big for the scientifically backed, tried-and-true, “basic” solutions to fix. Instead of giving the clichéd advice an honest try, we brush past it and seek out alternative options—options that are typically more complex, more expensive, and less tested, but that do have the benefit of being new and fun and exciting. Or, worse, we’ll do nothing. We’ll decide we know more than the experts or the people who have experienced this same thing already, and conclude that we are simply unfixable.

Is that self-sabotaging? Sure. But I think it comes from a place of wanting to protect our tender hearts and egos. It can feel more vulnerable to say, “I feel broken but I am fixable” than it does to say, “I’m so broken, I’m simply beyond repair.” The former asks something of us and can make us feel small and afraid, while the latter validates our struggle and feels kind of righteous. And when things aren’t going our way, that righteousness feels good.

To be clear, I don’t believe every problem can be solved by working out or drinking more water, nor do I think serious problems or health issues should be met with the ol’ “Have you tried essential oils?” sales pitch. But I do think if you are prone to magical thinking with regard to feeling better—and you tend to avoid taking care of your body as a result—it really is worth giving the self-care practices in this chapter a shot. Of course this shit doesn’t work all the time, in every situation, for every person. It doesn’t even always work for me! But in general, this shit works.