Two Glasses Deep: The Concept of “Me Time”

Leandra: I just had either the best or worst idea: we record the conversation we’re having right now, plus or minus two glasses of wine, and transcribe the conversation for Man Repeller.

The backstory: we’re talking about feeling overwhelmed, that sense of an inarticulable word best signified by the gesture of your head shaking and hands moving around back and forth. You’re not really realizing why you’re doing it or what is happening or what it means.

A: It looks like you’re juggling the air’s boobs.

L: It does! It looks like you’re a fifteen-year-old juggling boobs, that is exactly what it looks like, and your head is also spinning. Before we hit record, we were talking about how we answer the “How was your weekend?” question. My favorite answer is, “I stayed home for eight hours on Saturday.”

A: I would love to say that. I’m in a place that I think a lot of my friends are in right now where we’re so busy we don’t even call our parents, don’t have ten seconds to ourselves, can’t catch up on life or get our feet under us. When I do have ten seconds to myself, I just sit there and zone out. No productivity. I’m so tired that “me time” becomes about shutting down mentally and drooling.

Everyone’s solution to this problem is, “You know what you have to do — you have to cancel your plans! You say no to things!” But it feels like the equivalent of someone saying to you, “Oh, you should really try flying with your arms some time! New York looks really cool from above.” Like, what do you even mean?

L: There’s also the element of, what are you supposed to say, “no thank you” to all of the things (hanging out with friends, food 24 hours a day, etc) that are supposed to substantiate the reason you live in New York?

A: Yeah! On Sundays, I feel guilty if I’m at home when it feels like the whole world is at a bar, at a museum, outside of the City going to an even cooler museum — you feel like you’re wasting your life.

L: It sounds like you’re saying that living in New York is like being on vacation somewhere in a very culturally rich city. When I’m in Paris for Fashion Week – this has gotten better, but when I was there in the beginning, my first, second, third seasons – I kept coming back to, “What am I doing in this hotel room writing this story when I’m in France? I need to go to the Louvre, I need to go to this museum and that museum and this opening. I’m not taking advantage of the fact that I had to fly to get here!”

The reality is, I had work to get done. And I’m passionate about the work. That was true when I was in Tokyo last December, too. Instagram had just announced that they were removing a lot of “bots” from the app and I had the opportunity to go to a museum that day or write a story about “The Stalk Market.”

So what do I do? Go to the museum in Tokyo, or write this story? Obviously the reaction to this question is different for everyone, but I felt more motivated to stay put and write than I did to leave with the writing lingering over my head. Maybe that’s awful, but it’s what works for me. And what works for you, Amelia, is staying home and spending some time by yourself. So…

A: I don’t know if it’s New York more than anywhere else but you feel like you’re living a social obligation. When I’m freaking out about this, my dad reminds me that I’m not that important. He means it in a nice way, like take the pressures off yourself; you’re not the President. Everyone kind of feels a little bit like they are, though. “Everyone will be mad at me! I’ll lose my connections and my network and my friends! I’ll lose everything that I’ve been working for.” And some friends will give you shit for taking the night off.

L: That seems kind of immature to me.

A: For sure, but I know I’ve been in the reverse position, where the one friend you want to see cannot make time for you, and it’s not personal, but of course you take it personally. I hate when I make people feel that way. Especially people I care about.

It’s wrapped up in narcissism; it’s an inability to shut off for the sake of what happens when you do. Lose all your friends? I don’t know. And then you hear people who don’t live here say, “It’s so different in our town. Nobody goes out every single night.” There’s this weird appeal to living somewhere or belonging to a community where the 24/7 rule does not apply, where Monday through Thursday are proper weekdays, and everyone has agreed to go home at six, and maybe you text or take a phone call, or you go to a restaurant and then go home. But in New York? Things never stop. It’s “going-out” culture, but it’s also “networking” culture, and “being in touch” culture.

I find myself saying all the time to people, “Let’s catch up!” Sometimes I’m lying, sometimes I really do mean it, but what I actually mean is: “I’d love fifteen minutes with you to know how you’re doing. Then I’d love to go home…I’d love to speed date catch-up with you.”

L: Maybe that’s the future of speed dating. Speed friendship.

I think you make a lot of interesting points about how friendship in New York unfolds, because there are a lot of societal boundaries and restrictions, the way that a person is conditioned to feel like they’re connecting with somebody else. In my case, I feel like it took marriage to realize that that’s not reality. That you can live a very fulfilling life respecting yourself and knowing what works for you versus what doesn’t.

A: Sometimes I feel like people want to get married because marriage feels like a free pass to cancel plans.

L: It is kind of a free pass. But the problem isn’t really wanting to get married — that’s trying to put a band-aid on a wound that needs stitches. The problem is the way that we perceive friendship and what we think our friends expect from us. Right? So how do we change that system?

I think it just takes one.

A: Like one person just do it and drop the mic?

L: Yeah, because often times what will happen is that you won’t want to cancel a dinner and the person you’re eating with won’t want to cancel the dinner, either, so you’ll end up exhausted, eventually excusing yourself to the bathroom to text your boss something like, “I’m so sorry I couldn’t get those files to you tonight, I really wanted to get to it but unfortunately, I’m trapped underground.” She’ll pull out her phone and do something similar. Then you get home after the dinner and think, “I could have been home three hours earlier and I wasn’t because me and so-and-so were sitting across from each other at a table, smiling and talking about nothing for two hours.”

A: I always love when I’m sick or when there’s a Fashion Week, or Thanksgiving, some big holiday, because there’s always this agreed upon excuse like, “Sorry, I have the flu,” and everyone’s all, “Oh, no worries, I don’t want to touch you.”

Since it’s almost Christmas break, everyone’s saying, “Let’s schedule in the New Year!” You get a fake free pass. But then it comes back. The fear is that without the excuses… Like, what if I said, “Hey, honestly, I’m just taking these two weeks off to not see anyone.” People would be like, “What a fucking asshole.”

L: Well, why don’t you turn that into a social experiment? Would you ever try that?

A: No.

The other real, underlying factor, for sure, is that if you cancel enough…well, you remember that friend in high school who had a boyfriend and was always with her boyfriend? You stopped asking her to hang out. I think there’s a real fear that suddenly, if enough people catch wind of myself in Netflix and pajamas, they’ll stop asking me to hang out.

L: What are you so afraid of? You don’t also feel like we live in a society where everyone is feeling that a little bit? And would be relieved by your saying that? And what about this: I recently emailed Elizabeth (from our office) and was like, “I can’t do more than five meetings a week, so keep that in mind when we’re scheduling stuff. I will not leave the office more than five times a week, unless I am leaving to write or am leaving for an IVF appointment.”

A: But friends won’t be considered appointments?

L: An appointment is any engagement that takes you away from where you are.

A: I just had to have a “friend breakfast” because I hadn’t seen one of my best friends in a month and a half. And she was like, “Are you seriously scheduling a breakfast with me?” And I was like, “Yeah.” I felt guilty and weird: it felt like a press breakfast. Or like scheduling sex.

L: I think that’s called growing up. And maybe what’s happening is that the friends who you’re planning around are ones who haven’t quite figured that out yet, or haven’t actualized it or are still refusing to build it into their narratives, so they’re like, “What are you doing?” But they are also kind of relieved by the fact that something is on the calendar and they look forward to that thing on the calendar.

A: Right. I do too, I just also don’t know what it’s like to go home and have nothing to do. Do you have that?

L: Do you know what I do when I go home and there’s nothing to do? I write things that I actually want to write.

A: This Saturday was the first time where I could not figure out what was wrong with me until I just sat down and started writing. It was the first time in a long time where I was writing because I actually needed to.

L: And I cook food, and I take showers, and sometimes I shave my legs. I book appointments, I call doctors.

A: Fuck! It has been two weeks and I’m supposed to call this one doctor! I don’t do things!

L: I also text my mom. There’s no such thing as having nothing to do in 2015, you know what I mean?

A: I know, but isn’t the idea that there could be nothing to do the most beautiful thing you could think of?

L: It’s very, very indulgent in the same way that cashmere socks are.

A: I think about being bored in middle school. Those days or weeks when you literally had nothing to do and no one to hang out with.

L: And do you miss that?

A: Sometimes.

L: I never miss it. Because, you know what, something I want to talk about on the podcast is definitely this concept of being really busy and how I was always taught that being busy is better than being bored. And I took that to heart.

A: The first time I heard that, my mom was getting her hair done, and she got mad at me for saying I was bored.

L: My dad got mad at me for saying I was bored when I was like, thirteen and at home on vacation from school

A: “Only boring people get bored.” Do you ever look at someone who has the kind of job where they get to turn off at the end of the day, like clock in and clock out, with nothing to think about after?

L: When I am feeling really burnt out, I totally sympathize with that, like going home and having my own life. But when I’m feeling inspired and motivated, I don’t want to go to sleep and I don’t want to leave the office and I don’t want to not be working. Which I much, much prefer. Maybe we just have to take back, “busy.”

Bottom line: it ain’t over ’til the traffic cone says, “Keep moving.”

Collage by Krista Anna Lewis

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