The Art of Showing Up: How to Be There for Yourself and Your People

by Rachel Wilkerson Miller

Showing up is an alternative to living that faux “I’m fine” life.

Acceptance is about being brave enough to look at who you are and not turning away or immediately looking for a fix when you don’t like what you see. It’s not about settling; after all, you may still want to make significant changes that will ultimately make your life better. It’s about grace—offering yourself compassion and mercy, even if you’re not totally convinced you deserve it.

It’s easy to believe your likes and dislikes as something that are established when you’re a child or a teen. You pick a favorite color at five years old and that’s it, you’re done—purple forever! And that’s often how our families treat our likes and dislikes, right? You briefly express an interest in, say, narwhals when you’re in sixth grade and now, more than a decade later, your older relatives are still clipping articles that reference narwhals out of the local newspaper and mailing them to you.

I became confident in asking for what I need the old-fashioned way: one terrified-but-ultimately-fine request at a time.

Making space begins with making choices. If you don’t decide how you want to live your life, other people will decide for you.

First, the moment you begin to document something, the less present you are. And the more you create, the more you invite responses, which traps you in a cycle of liking and responding even more. Constant output is super distracting, saps valuable energy, and ensures that you’re never (or rarely) really alone. A lot of people take breaks from consuming social media, but it’s also worth taking a hiatus from creating it. Because if you’re constantly texting and posting and messaging, you’re not quite alone with your thoughts, observations, and experiences.

Dunbar told the Times that social media apps allow us “to maintain relationships that would otherwise decay.”10 While most of us tend to think of this as a good thing, it’s actually not. Some of these relationships actually should decay—that’s necessary for us to have the time and space to establish and nurture new ones.

It’s shockingly easy to expend a lot of mental and creative energy on this steady drip-drip-drip of words all day, which can leave you feeling quite drained, even though you’re not actually producing anything.

It turned out that most people didn’t really care if I responded to a message in five minutes or five hours. And I realized that the people who hassled me about it were less interested in talking to me and more interested in having a responsive, friend-shaped receptacle where they could unleash their every thought whenever they felt like it. And that felt really shitty, and not like a friendship at all.

Remember that texting is a relatively modern invention, and so is the expectation of constant availability.

To hurt your own feelings is to engage in completely optional behaviors that you know make you feel bad. And the optional part really is key. This isn’t about the situations in which you can’t avoid terrible or annoying or abusive people; it’s about the situations when you know the “block” and “mute” and “unfollow” and “log off” buttons exist, and you’re simply refusing to use them.

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.)

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.

I realized that things are good until they are not, and they are bad until they are not. So often, the bad times happen without any sort of warning. But I found it comforting to remember that the good periods also tend to happen without warning. This isn’t to say you can’t actively work toward improving bad situations; you can. But turning a corner, moving on, getting to the other side, whatever you want to call it, is a complicated thing that is often governed by, I don’t know . . . the wind? So instead of trying to change The Big Thing—which was fundamentally unchangeable—I just tried to make myself comfortable. I didn’t try to feel happy; I tried to feel less bad. I accepted beauty and joy wherever I could get it and trusted that these small things would help me hang on until the wind started blowing my way again. And you know what? They did.

Truly, one of the worst aspects of dealing with something traumatic or terrible is how big it is. Your stress and anger and grief aren’t restricted to when you’re engaging with the bad thing; you carry it with you everywhere.

Not thinking about the future after my ex left was hard for me, but it wasn’t as difficult as I expected. I realized I had no choice. The alternative—feeling like my heart was going to beat through my chest every day because I was so stressed about what might happen in six months—wasn’t practical.

if you don’t have a lot of friends in the top tier, it’s easy to treat level 4 or 5 friends like they are level 9 or 10 friends—because they are your “best” friends, even if they aren’t actually your best friends. It’s truly a bummer not to have someone who feels like Your Person, but trying to fast-track friendship in this way tends to backfire. So before you unload on your friends, it can be worthwhile to take an honest look at the relationship. Does the sharing go both ways? Are you Their Person, too? Or are you vaunting them to a higher level of friendship when it’s not really appropriate or earned?

When you’re feeling overwhelmed or guilty, remember: This is exactly why the phrase “family emergency” exists. The emergency is here; it’s yours and it’s happening right now. It’s easy to lose sight of this in the moment—to tell yourself that “real” trauma is something that happens to other people and not to you (especially if you don’t want to admit that what is happening is really, really bad).

Throughout my adult life, I’ve had (and have!) multiple best friends. Still, I’m not immune to the idea that I should have a singular best friend who also considers me their best friend. That idea is pervasive, and the pressure is real. But I’m beginning to realize that this best friend is, for a lot of people, a myth. Like, a best friend? In this economy???

Become known as the friend who says, “I believe you,” especially if your friend has never given you any reason not to believe them.

Showing up for one person sometimes means shutting the door on someone else.

Not all friendships are forever friendships, and some friendships are helped a great deal by proximity or exposure or being at a certain life stage. It can be a bummer to realize that, and it might leave you thinking, Was this just a friendship of convenience? But I don’t think it necessarily means the friendship wasn’t real; it’s just that some friendships simply can’t overcome inconvenience, and you had no way of knowing this until one of you got a new job or moved away.

Sorry to be all teacher-in-an-after-school-special, but the people who judge you or mock you when you talk about things you’re clearly excited about aren’t the people you’re meant to be friends with.

The simplest way to not come across as judgmental when people are opening up to you is to not judge them. If you’re prone to judginess, consider spending more time engaging with people, places, traditions, cultures, and ideas that are outside your current set of experiences. The more you hear or read about new-to-you experiences firsthand, the less shocking human behavior becomes, and the easier it is to react calmly and offer compassion to the people in a particular situation.

After a big crisis or just a big life change, set reminders to check in with the person periodically. Those follow-ups mean a lot, and even if the friend doesn’t need any support the first four times you ask, they’ll know exactly who to call when they do.

Get comfortable with the fact that families sometimes let each other down in serious ways that can’t be repaired or forgiven (or that will simply require a lot of time and distance before healing is possible). We live in the real world, where abuse, rejection, cruelty, manipulation, addiction, and violence exist and can happen to the people we love and care about.

This isn’t the time to share your thoughts on how “having a baby isn’t impressive, anyone can do it.” They literally can’t!!!

Believe your friend if they say they are being abused. Even if the abuser has never been abusive in front of you, even if they “seem so nice,” even if the abuse isn’t physically violent, even if your friend doesn’t match your idea of how an abuse victim looks or behaves.

So often when a friend hurts or disappoints us, we convince ourselves that it’s better for everyone if we just swallow our feelings and say nothing—and then either slowly pull away from the person who hurt us, or harbor bitterness for years.

I love radical candor because it aligns so well with two of my core values: sincerity and compassion. It’s important to me that the people in my life know they can trust me—that my word is good, that I mean what I say.

Sometimes, the only way to deal with a situation is to have an honest conversation. Sometimes, the only way out is through the door.

When people complain, they are seeking validation. They don’t want to solve the problem; they want to hear that they have every right to be pissed. If you don’t offer much in the way of an emotional reaction, you’ll be far less “fun” to talk to.

To speak up is to start establishing a friend group and a culture where inappropriate or unkind behavior isn’t tolerated.

In my experience, saying “I’m embarrassed” or “I’m mortified”—when you are, in fact, embarrassed or mortified—goes a long way in diffusing a tense situation. It tends to disarm people (myself included!) and helps us connect as human beings instead of opponents.

When we tell ourselves it’s OK to settle for toxic friendships, we aren’t giving friendships nearly enough credit. Of course our friends have the power to hurt us so deeply that we need to walk away; to say otherwise disregards the significance of these relationships.

You don’t have to have a difficult conversation via a medium you’re not fluent in just because it’s the “right” thing according to an etiquette guide written by someone who never had to compose an AIM away message that communicated everything in a single sentence.

Each time we show up for ourselves or for someone else, it’s like we’re turning on a single bulb in a strand of Christmas lights. A bulb can be anything: a text, a hug, a pair of pajamas, a puzzle. Occasionally, we’ll get to make a grand gesture that illuminates several bulbs at once, but for the most part, showing up is done one small, quiet act by small, quiet act.