Reflections on building capacity in an attention-starved culture
“I've been running on empty and calling it strength. I've reopened old wounds 'cause I won't take a break." – Joy Oladokun, DRUGS
Doing it for the Attention is a newsletter that highlights how asking for attention has been weaponized against us. Through personal essays, Q&As and community resources, I offer strategies to help us rebuild the skill set and the capacity that puts our creative, liberatory work in the spotlight.
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“Remember this: a self is not a thing, but a becoming — on and on until we die.” – Windswept by Annabel Abbs
“You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! So do I! But if I wanted to crawl into a cave and watch stalagmites with Frostfrog for the remainder of my days, that would also be both fine and good. You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live. This is all most animals do.” – A Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers
“I've been running on empty and calling it strength. I've reopened old wounds 'cause I won't take a break. I know l've got to make a change. I won't hurt myself or go through Hell tryna’ prove my place” – Joy Oladokun, DRUGS
“You are a machine.” My boss commented, delight in his eyes and a smile playing on his lips, after reviewing a spreadsheet I had labored over.
I smiled widely in return. What I would later perceive as commentary on an entrenched capitalist mindset was the highest compliment to my 22-year-old ears.
At the time, I was eager to devote myself to a cause. The small nonprofit where I had first volunteered and was now employed was committed to addressing the systemic obstacles that kept the unhoused from securing and maintaining employment.
After two successful fundraising efforts, I was high off the momentum and ready to create systems where there were none and address the gaps that kept the organization from functioning at its peak.
Or at least that was my intention.
Obstacle after obstacle presented itself, reminding me at each barrier that I was low on both the resources and the persuasive tactics required to effect change.
It didn’t take long before I hit a wall, run down by all my empty efforts.
So, I did what my nervous system knew best.
I ran.
Far away, in fact. All the way to the boot-shaped island that prioritizes the afternoon break, pausa pranzo, over an endless to-do list.
I ran away to Italy.
MOKA-BREWED MADNESS
While Elizabeth Gilbert fueled my curiosities about Italy, we had very different experiences. In my early twenties, my mind full of making the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, I saw the evening passeggiata as cute rather than the community-forward ritual that it is. Wherever I went, the tiptop of a mountain in Cinque Terre or on the beach in Calabria, my laptop was never far away.
At the time, the idea of being a digital nomad was plastered on the vision board of many an online entrepreneur, and I felt like I was living the dream. Not coincidentally, I was working on the team of an entrepreneur whose brand was all about making money while living out of her suitcase.
When I came back home five months later, I did the opposite of what you would expect after a cultural immersion in Europe.
I didn’t slow down. I sped up. (And my new love of espresso meant that I used one moka-brewed shot after the other to do so.)
At my mother’s rosewood dining table, I wrote the first of many blog posts that would eventually become a business built on sharing what I was learning in Italian.
After working at a pace that Gary Vaynerchuk would have applauded to create multiple programs and e-books, I had logged hundreds of hours contorting myself to the shape of my laptop.
That contortion, and that misaligned internal compass, would lead to my first diagnosis at 26: shoulder bursitis.
A MARAUDER’S MAP OF INFLAMMATION
“I’m going to follow the inflammation and see where it leads me.” This is what my massage therapist, a mother of seven, once told me while I lay on her table.
Every inch she tended to burned with irritation before being subsequently soothed by her touch. I paid attention to the path of her fingers, the way it dimpled into my flesh and then moved forward to the next angry spot.
The way she talked about inflammation, as if it were alive and communicative, made me wonder if could be a map. Ideally, a Marauder’s map, one not fooled by elementary spells and potions. But the way that it felt in my body — tattered, dense, illegible — prevented me from following the footsteps. I felt like a student in geography class, struggling to wrap my mind around how such tiny lines could represent the scale of our world.
Shoulder bursitis got my attention, but it didn’t keep it. Over the next few years, I would use alcohol, junk food, and toxic relationships to keep me distracted from what was going on inside of me.
It wasn’t long before the mew-like sounds from my body turned into an Aslan-like roar.
I developed insomnia. For hours after eating any meal, I became bloated and gassy. Within minutes of being awake, a dense mist would settle throughout the grooves of my brain. After the first few sips, alcohol made me sick. And, yes, my shoulder was still incredibly inflamed.
Always on the lookout for someone or something to blame, I started to see inflammation as the enemy.
In response, I followed the Marvel blueprint for vanquishing villains. I suited up, got my weapons and waged war on my illness with full force.
And I got sicker and sicker and sicker.
THE SIREN SONG OF AMBITION
“Interlace the web of your thumbs over the lower dantian and just allow your body to rock and sway like a bamboo in the wind.”
It was 4:47 in the morning. My 10-month-old, a notoriously difficult sleeper, was tucked into her crib, and her dad was asleep in the bed that we no longer shared.
Unable to sleep, I was standing in front of the TV, following a YouTube video for qigong, a form of moving meditation meant to help you purge, tonify, and revitalize your energy.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine, a stagnant body is an unwell body.
According to The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon (黄帝内经), a classic Chinese medical text from around 300BC, one of the ministers, Qi Bo, tells the emperor, Huang Di, that people aren’t living as long because they “drain their jing – the body’s essence that is stored in the Kidneys – and deplete their qi. They do not know the secret of conserving their energy and vitality. Seeking emotional excitement and momentary pleasures, people disregard the natural rhythm of the universe.”
From my first experiences working in the nonprofit world to becoming a new mother, I had made depleting myself a habit, one that I had paired with an extreme inattention to what my body and mind needed.
It didn’t matter what task I was doing – work or household – I would achieve the outcome I was fixated on at any cost.
Do you remember the motto “move fast and break things” that came out of the Facebook ethos around 2012? Apparently, I had liked it so much that I borrowed the words, placing them out-of-context into my life, as one born and bred in the soup of capitalism often does.
I know that I’m not the only one who has had her ass handed to her by the pervasive ideas that these systems so alluringly place on a platter for us all.
To rush around, obsessed with outcomes, our agendas more important than everyone else’s, our bodies depleted and in pain, our grief and rage unaddressed, our nervous systems chronically dysregulated.
Luckily for us, our nervous systems, like our brains, are forgiving, offering us the gift of plasticity.
Beatriz Victoria Albina, a Functional Medicine Nurse Practitioner and expert in nervous system healing, was the first person to help me to connect the dots between my habits of emotional outsourcing (perfectionism, people pleasing, over functioning, and overworking) with nervous system dysregulation and chronic illness.
In her description of functional freeze, a mixed-nervous system state where you feel simultaneously revved up and shut down, I recognized the shape I had taken.
Here I was, in my early thirties, always bracing myself, treating every hint of displeasure from someone else as dangerous. Always tired but always vigilant and always, always on.
After all, I had become a solo parent of a toddler, 100% reliant on my business to sustain us.
Even then, my situation had improved. I could think clearly during the day. I was no longer plagued by excessive bouts of digestive dysfunction. And, more often than before, I fell asleep at night.
Yet, the hyper-vigilance continued, this time with an obsession of following the protocol my functional nutritionist had created for me.
illustrates this hyper-vigilance around food better than I ever could.In her memoir, The Invisible Kingdom, she describes what a typical morning looked like for her:
“I would go outside to jump on a trampoline (supposedly it stimulates the lymphatic system, which helps eliminate toxins and waste), then come inside to dry-brush my body with a natural-bristle brush (more lymphatic benefits). For breakfast, I would pull out a container of dairy-free kefir, made from coconut – the probiotics were supposed to be good for the gut. I would mix it with cinnamon (my insulin was low, and cinnamon is said to help stabilize blood sugar) and ground flaxseed (for the omega fatty acids, which apparently reduce inflammation). Then came the almond milk, which I had to make myself. (My online advisers forbade the store-bought kind, which contained additives like carrageenan or xanthan gum.) This involved soaking the almonds overnight, pinching the skins off them one by one, grinding the nuts, pouring water through the meal – are you still with me? – and straining the liquid through an organic, unbleached cheesecloth. Next, I would add two walnuts – although I had read that they contained the wrong omega-6 to omega-3 ratios, so one had to be careful with them – and some raspberries, though I worried about the raspberries, too. They were rich in liver-protective rheosmin but also contained fructose and supposedly could ferment in the gut, encouraging the bad bacteria that led to hormone imbalances. Finally, I would sit down to eat the concoction.”
With humor and precision, O’Rourke captures what it’s like to live with a nutritional dictionary of doubt in your mind, the pendulum erratically swinging between risk and reward.
Some days, it felt as though I lived at the mercy of a drunk person playing shuffleboard, sliding backward and forward in healing, hoping that one day I would do everything exactly right and earn the reward of checking my undiagnosed illnesses off my to-do list for good.
After all, that was story arc that I had read about and heard on podcasts and hoped to manifest.
It’s what Arthur Frank, author of The Wounded Storyteller, refers to as the restitution narrative.
Girl gets sick. Girl finds perfect protocol and takes supplements with ascetic diligence. Girl gets better. Girl does a cold plunge every day and humble brags about it while citing a Huberman episode. Girl tells everyone about how she healed herself and offers unsolicited advice about how you can do it too.
A linear healing journey wrapped up tight with a symmetrical bow.
*eye roll*
In the midst of all of this, I was surprised by how insistently ambition buzzed around me, stinging me whenever I sat down to rest.
I wanted to write a novel!
I wanted to finally learn Chinese and teach it to my two-year-old.
I wanted to be the strong girl at the gym who could do weighted pull ups.
Without much thought, I turned up the volume on ambition’s siren song, insisting that there was no need to tie myself to the mast. To me, the secret to doing all the things lay in creating micro-goals outfitted with consistency.
If I just made it small enough, achievable enough, I could do all of that and heal my body and parent alone and run a business.
I could extract every microunit of energy from my body to get more done in less time.
I was sure of it.
THE GIFT OF NOTHING
Then, six months ago, while walking up the stairs, I felt a deep heaviness in my limbs, one that cascaded from the base of my neck down to the tips of my toes.
At first, it didn’t make any sense.
I was doing all the things that I knew should be helping me heal. I was avoiding gluten, refined sugar, alcohol, and caffeine. I was doing nervous system work through Dr. Stephen Porge’s Safe and Sound protocol. I was exercising regularly. And, most miraculously, my kid was finally sleeping through the night with consistency, which meant I was finally getting quality sleep.
But no matter how rested I thought I should feel, the heaviness persisted, making a residence within me. At first, it scared me, especially since it had not come alone.
Sadness had arrived hand in hand with it.
Together, they demanded my attention. I was a member of the audience, rapt at their dialogue. I waited a week, then two for the feeling to dissipate. Sometimes, it did, but it continued to resurface in new and more fluid ways, persistent and pervasive.
Instead of forcing myself to push through, I got curious, asking myself: what do I need right now?
The answer I received: do nothing.
So, for the first time in a long time, I listened. I put everything down. The novel I was rewriting. The language goals I had for Mandarin Chinese. All the podcasts I had saved to listen to later.
I cleared my nightstand of books I had borrowed from the library. I said no to the shows and movies I had wanted to watch.
I pressed pause on everything non-essential, telling myself that I would try this blank canvas type living for a few days and then return to business as usual.
Days morphed into weeks. Time stretched out with such disregard for my agenda that I began to worry that I might never return to the things that I had decided were worth my limited energy.
With difficulty, I decided to do the opposite of what I had always done in the past. I gave my body the mic, and it continued to amplify its reminder to do nothing. Nothing associated with “bettering myself” or “being productive.” In place of my typical routine, I lay on my bed and stared up at the ceiling.
In that time, I noticed a lot.
A painting that I inherited from my mother that’s been on my walls for over three years… the leaves? They looked just like penises!
I texted people back more quickly. I had time to massage my shoulders and neck in long careful strokes without the urgent feeling of needing to move on to whatever had been color-coded in the calendar of my mind.
Most interestingly, meditation evolved into a kind of self check-in. Instead of imagining my thoughts as clouds passing me by, I let them frolic and wander and spiral and explode. I would break meditation “rules” by releasing my body from lotus position to stretch and dance and sing.
Fantasies about elves coming into my house in the night to finish my client deliverables so that I could do this – this blissful nothing – all day long invaded my dreams.
Alan Lightman, a scientist and the author of In Praise of Wasting Time, echoes my sentiment.
After years of subdividing his ‘day into smaller and smaller units of efficient time use,’ he noticed that there was ‘no breathing space remaining.’
In an experience that feels strikingly similar to mine, he says, “…instead of trying to empty my mind, as one does in meditation, and letting my thoughts drifts by like moving clouds, I followed my thoughts, but in an unhurried and liberated way. Without setting out to do so, I began sewing together the pieces of my life.”
Lightman proposes that these thoughts — the ones that brought back memories — ‘were about the renewal and consolidation’ of his identity, and anyone can do this by getting away ‘from the rush and heave of the world.’
In that nascent space of abundance, the needle and thread I held showed me that I had depleted myself yet again. That I had let my wasp-like ambition run me in the opposite direction of joy, had let it continue to affirm to my body and mind that its default setting was extraction.
More importantly, I had tried to Grand Prix my way through nervous system healing, acting as if it were something to race through rather than a gentle and incremental coaxing of my body from unsafety to safety.
My devotion to not wasting time, to making the most of the minutes and days and years that I have left, had become shadowy, a black veil draped over my eyes and shoved down my throat.
It’s become clear to me that my relationship with time was malformed because I assumed I knew what it was, that I understood what its best and highest use was — an understanding hastened, in part, by losing my mother in my twenties.
The core of my misunderstanding came from not realizing time was made up of so many layers.
is an Indigenous Time Ecologist who distinguishes between Colonial Time and Spiral Time, a distinction she learned to make while living with chronic PTSD, chronic pain, and ADHD.She says, “Colonial Time shapes us into urgency and Spiral Time asks us to return to our rhythm. Colonial Time is burning Time. It’s where we spend our life force energy trying to conform to Time as control instead of building relationship with Time as kin. Spiral Time repairs, it listens. It makes room for grief and memory.”
Not only does this widen the lens on what I thought I knew about time, it softens the grip I thought it had on me while simultaneously allowing me to shift blame where blame is due.
Let’s take this notion — that we don’t really know what time is — one step further.
If you ask Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist who studies quantum gravity, time does not exist at all.
He supports that radical statement with lessons from physics to demonstrate how little we know about time. There is no exact and universal now. There is no difference between past and future ‘in the elementary equations of the world.’ Time isn’t uniform — it moves more quickly in some places and more slowly in others. There is no linear timeline, events stacked one behind the other.
Rovelli, satisfied with having explained the science, moves on to discuss our perception of time, and seems to land on a similar conclusion to Lightman’s.
He says, “What is entirely credible, in any case, is the general fact that the temporal structure of the world is different from the naïve image that we have of it. The naïve image is suitable for our daily life, but it’s not suitable for understanding the world in its folds, or in its vastness. In all likelihood, it’s not even sufficient for understanding our own nature because the mystery of time intersects with the mystery of our personal identity, with the mystery of consciousness.”
I’ve brought you back to your junior year of high school with all the talk about physics because this statement demonstrates what so many people urging us to slow down and reflect have been trying to say for thousands of years.
Namely, that making time our master diminishes the vastness of our humanity, puts us in small boxes at the mercy of a poor memory of how big we actually are.
Like a low-grade infection that distracts our immune systems and siphons our energy, we often let a disease-ridden version of time divert us from what nourishes our humanity.
And personally, I had, as adrienne maree brown talks about, let myself not only live in someone else’s imagination (likely some white dude in a pulpit) but I had let him pull the reins on the bit of shame clenched between my teeth.
I didn’t want to live in that dream anymore.
But to extricate oneself requires strength.
And strength demands capacity.
So how do we build it?
CAPACITY BUILDING IN REAL TIME
In a moving portrait of creative women who walked long distances throughout history – from Georgia O’Keefe to Gwen John — Annabel Abbs, a journalist and novelist, talks about how these women walked vast distances for ‘emotional restitution.’
They knew something was missing, and they intuitively understood that they needed space and time to traverse the distance inside of them.
Like the author and all the women profiled in Windswept, I quickly graduated from needing the space to rolling around with unabashed joy inside of it. The more I gave myself permission to experience it, the more swiftly I could locate myself beneath the narratives and rules that had been given to me.
In that way, I cultivated a practice of self-recognition, one that helped me identify divergent pathways through time for moving at the pace of my values instead of the ones our culture gives us.
Elements that used to make up the equation of my days — using chronic force and denial to be productive at all costs — were challenged by concepts that finally, after years of occupying my mind as 2D text, took up somatic residence in my body.
Safety met self-trust and, coaxed into relationship with each other, led to clarity of heart and of intention.
My gut lining was still porous, my bladder still erratic, my body still prone to fatigue.
But all of that mattered less than this: I had stopped asking my body for more than it had to give.
I had begun to heed Qi Bo’s advice and had stopped giving away my energy to anyone who walked by or any task that had previously seemed like something I must do.
Like Jordan Maney, a coach who examines rest from a decolonial lens, recommends, I had started adhering to the acronym EAT and had begun to return Energy, Attention, and Time to myself.
Bit by bit, I collected it, letting it wander and settle inside of me. Finally, for the first time in several years, it not only felt like I had enough, but it felt like I was doing enough.
INHABITING A DIFFERENT DREAM
A few weeks ago, I sat on a shore of the Spokane river, a body of water that I’ve come to look to for guidance since moving to the inland northwest. Displaced by the high water, I set my blanket far back from my usual spot, noting how the previous barrier had been dissolved by a flood of need.
Sitting on a singular patch of dirt, imagining the rocks and shrubs I can usually touch tumbling and swirling below the current, I realized this river has been showing me something obvious.
At specific points in the year, it carves and re-carves paths, while, at others, it recedes, never questioning its ability to swell to full power later on.
This river served as vibrant, visual proof that I can also live in rhythm with the universe, and while conserving my energy, still offer beauty and depth and sustenance to those around me.
As I applied gentle brush strokes to weighted paper in an attempt to capture the scene before me, the lesson that less does not mean lazy and that slowing down does not mean giving up rooted one layer deeper into the soil of my mind.
I inspected the painting once the paint had dried and then held it up to compare it to the real thing.
It didn’t capture it, but I was glad to have tried anyway.
Thanks for reading this!
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This was delicious. Thank you 🙏🏼
Oof. I relate to this so much and learn so much from your journey that makes me want to be braver in my own. Thank you.