Make Space
Last week I had a charmingly inane conversation with my physical therapist. I’m laid on his massage table. He’s smashing on my leg with his hands. The smashing business is going to take a while, and we’re small-talking about our podcast listening habits, and he asks, if I had a podcast, what would it be about?
(His, we had already established, was going to be about the KC Chiefs, for he is a Sports Boy.)
I hem and haw and then concede I’m not sure. My first thought is: lean into what I know. But what I know – professionally, at least – is grant writing, and wow is grant writing boring. He suggests that my podcast could be about learning new things in adulthood. Guitar, skateboarding, pickleball, cross stitch, tap dance…look, I like to try new things, and it’s a hard and weird thing to do when you’re a bona fide grown-up and I do have a lot of thoughts about it.
Anyway, that was the entire conversation and it made me laugh. I was flattered, even, that he thought I was fun and plucky for constantly putting myself in peril vs. a grievously uncool 37-year-old, padded to the hilt and riding a skateboard. I felt happier and lighter for having connected with someone.
This encounter was notable because so rarely does talking with someone – especially a casual acquaintance – make me feel good. I just don’t shine in social situations, a challenge that has dogged me my whole life. I’m smart and I’m capable and I have good ideas and – oh, I’m also extremely anxious so I’m going to leave now and doodle quietly in my office. Workplaces are where I perhaps shine the least, preoccupied as I am with getting by on the very most meagre daily allotment of energy for socializing. Up until recently, I had no choice but to spend all that energy at work.
I dreaded chance encounters in the hallway, lest they require a stop-and-chat. One boss was always mad at me because, while I was present and attentive at meetings, I wasn’t talking enough for their liking (this, in retrospect, was a very bad boss). An ice breaking exercise could launch an existential crisis. I was great at my job and everyone liked me (I’m very generically “nice!”) but I just didn’t have the personality that would propel me to break through and rise.
Then, the pandemic happened.
The pandemic was and remains irredeemably bad. You have to hand it to Covid, though: it was a real disruption. It set in motion a chain of events that (here we leap blithely past weeks of worried hand wringing) led me to resign a job that I loved – but that wasn’t serving me well – and start a business. This business has me writing my grants (my blessedly tedious expertise) alone, at home. I’m in my beautiful office loft with the slanty walls I used to bang my head on all the time. My three cats are constantly climbing around and shouting. This is my workplace all day, every day.
This is where I started to thrive.
When I was languishing at the office, it wasn’t the right personality that I was lacking. It certainly wasn’t a lack of experience, nor confidence, or the initiative to speak up in meetings. It was space to relax and just be.
Because I work from home I am a new, more patient person. I am able to engage with the outside world – not just clients and colleagues, but the nice lady running the front desk at the physical therapy office and the person I smiled at as we passed on the sidewalk – because I’m not spending my social/emotional energy at work. The contemporary office just wasn’t created for anxious introverts; and yet I went to one every day for ten years and put on the performance of a lifetime: Professional Person Who Doesn’t Want to Cry Because You Asked How Her Weekend Was.
(an act roundly panned by critics)
It turns out you don’t have to spend all your life trying to thrive in an environment built by and for someone else. Or, maybe you do; the opportunity to earn money in a setting built to optimize your own function is afforded to few (pun not intended, but how apropos).
What you definitely don’t have to do is believe that the problem is yours to hold. It simply is not. You deserve gentleness, even if all the gentleness you ever get is what you give yourself.
You deserve to live and work in an environment where you flourish. And if that simply isn’t possible, then you deserve to make little pockets of safety for yourself. You deserve to ask for what you need, and if you don’t get it, then you deserve the peace of knowing you were worthy of wanting it.
When we have more space for ourselves, we have more energy to give to the world. You can have a playful, consequence-less conversation with the physical therapy guy trying to massage the plantar fasciitis out of your foot, and it will leave you feeling cheered because you were able to engage positively with someone instead of drained and annoyed and worried that you did small talk all wrong.
Too many years spent trying to conform is what convinced me that there had to be a way for me to come to the table just as I was, and for that to be enough. Sure enough, there is, but I had to build the table myself. That’s not ideal.
This is an informal call for more tables – more spaces – where you and others can belong. Build your table or grab a table out of the basement or sweep the papers off an overstuffed desk and proclaim, “this is the table, now” and then allow both yourself and others to come there and, quite simply, be enough.
