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

by Rachel Wilkerson Miller

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.