The Benefits of Choosing to Stay Behind

“I think I’m going to stay behind,” I say. My friends stop gathering their purses. One pauses with her shoe halfway on.

“Do you not want to bike?” she asks.

“We don’t have to go to town, we can go somewhere else,” says another.

We’re staying by the beach in Santa Barbara for Labor Day weekend. A house where I can walk barefoot out the back door straight onto sand, breathing in salt air as soon as I crack open a window. The first night was filled with laughter that made my stomach hurt, laughter like I had forgotten existed until tears were rolling down my cheeks and I forgot to worry about whether we were bothering the people around us. The kind of joy that can only come in the company of people you adore, everything else in your life sinking into peace so that you can be only right where you are, in that moment.

But as the weekend progressed, the weather hitting undocumented heights, my skin eaten alive by mosquitos, my introvert started taking over. I read on the beach while everyone swam in the ocean, ordered water on our bar crawl while the others cheersed their beers.

They’re all waiting on me, confused and concerned when I say I’d rather pass on our dinner plans. I feel my skin warm, my breath goes shaky like it does anytime I’m embarrassed.

“I want you guys to go, I’m just going to take a breather and hang out on my own for a bit,” I say. It’s the truth—when I feel myself getting into one of these moods all I want to do is be alone, not tear anyone down with me. But even in knowing that, I can’t pretend this isn’t a version of myself I don’t get along with. I spiral myself further down the rabbit hole, feeling awful for letting my friends down, berating myself for not being fun for them.

That mental storm brings me nowhere. But after a lifetime of being the quiet one, of battling against an introverted nature that I should have spent time embracing and learning to understand, I have learned a few things.

1. Negative self-talk will cause you to retreat inward.

Needing to spend time alone to recharge is not something you should feel ashamed of—and yet I know I’m not alone in feeling like something is wrong with me for needing a break from the people I love. Telling myself I should be ashamed, or trying to pep talk myself into doing something I don’t want to do, only drains me further, and keeps me trapped in my own head. The worse I feel about myself, the less likely I will want to be around others.

2. Pinpointing the source of your change in mood can save your day.

Going from feeling so blessed and joyful to be with my friends to feeling like I needed to step away didn’t happen in an instant. After I’ve taken some time for myself, it’s most productive for me to figure out if it was too much time together, if it was a bad mood brought on by exhaustion or heat or hunger, or if I was letting something from the past keep me from feeling present that had me feeling the way I did. Then I can work directly against that source to come back happier and ready to enjoy time with my loved ones again.

3. Getting out of your head can be more helpful than working out what’s in it.

This might go against every therapeutic technique I’ve heard, but when I’m taking time to recharge, sometimes the last thing I need is to journal, or meditate, or pray. Sometimes I need to just grab a book or throw on one of my most comforting Netflix shows, get lost in another world, and come back remembering that life is a whole lot bigger than me passing on dinner plans.

4. Remember that the people in your life are in it because they love you—period.

So much of my shame around introversion stems from not wanting to disappoint or be a burden on my people. For the most part, I love making plans and going on adventures and sitting around kitchen tables with my friends and their friends and their friend’s friends. But the times I have to hang back or say no to a fun Friday evening won’t make them think differently of me. So hug your people, let them know you adore them, and that you’ll see them when you’re recharged and capable of enjoying yourself.

In Santa Barbara, I watched my friends go, decided to sit on the couch for an episode of Gilmore Girls. It was the kind of sweet alone time I’d been craving, and when the others came home not an hour later, they sat on the couch with me, told me they missed me, and we lay huddled together on a couch too small for four for the rest of the night.

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Why did you move?

A cardstock print sits propped against the lamp on my desk: a taupe watercolor swipe outlining a peakside Saguaro, the sun a tiny ring above. Beneath this minimalist illustration are these words in typeface: “I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”

I happened upon this notecard-sized print on the way out of a shop last weekend, after already having completed another purchase. It was the last print of its kind in the pile. I had to have it. I returned to the cashier: “This one, too.”

You see, this verse has been a thread weaving through my story, simple words spoken by a prophet long dead, a passage of comfort I’ve returned to again and again since my pilgrimage to the desert four years ago, when I inked a cactus on my wrist.

The Good Old Days

Last week was National Margarita Day.

I did not, however, celebrate the holiday. Truthfully, I’ve yet to find THE Mexican place here in Phoenix. You know the one: gaudy decorations, cheap food, even cheaper margaritas.

But there’s a Mexican restaurant at the corner of Charlotte and Whitebridge in Nashville, TN.

You may have heard of it.

10 Life Lessons This Cross-Country Move is Attempting to Teach Me

There are a few lessons life has attempted to teach me since my move — all things that I haven’t yet spiced up into a full essay, but deserve to be memorialized by my metaphorical pen nonetheless.

So I present a collection of lessons I’ve learned — and am still learning — in the last 3 months.

When The Hardest Thing & The Right Thing Are the Same

“Nuh uh!” I had protested.

The best thing about being 15 years old is that you know absolutely everything there is to know about life.

I certainly did.

I was arguing with my friends over the line in a song from The Fray (#tbt to moody middle school days): “Sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same.”

Doing the right thing should never be hard, I confidently claimed. Anytime you have the choice to do the right thing, the healthy thing, the thing that builds up rather than tears down, it should never, ever be difficult to choose that.

Like I said, I knew everything.

Of course, 13 years later, I know that I don’t actually know much at all. And I also know that the hardest thing and the right thing are just about ALWAYS the same. It’s madness, really.

A Holy Yes to the Real Things: On Setting Social Media Boundaries

Two and a half hours.

That’s how long I had spent on my phone that day. Reading emails, sure. Responding to texts, some. Catching up on news, a bit. But mostly: scrolling through Instagram.

I had spent an hour of my day clicking through clips of someone else’s life. The sad truth? Some days, I’ve spent way more than just one hour lost to Instagram.

This is where the High School Musical cast flash mobs my brain with “we’re all in this together”—because my educated guess is that you can relate to this daily scroll-fest, too.

Who You Are Now: On Outgrowing Earlier Versions of Yourself

In the last few months, I’ve realized, much to my dismay, that I look older. That I am aging. This sounds dramatic coming from an able-bodied twenty-seven-year old, but it’s true. I didn’t know I found so much worth and security in the way that I looked until I started to notice a difference.

As humans, we note the passing of time in the changes around us. The tree that was once green is now orange, now yellow, now brown and bare. The crack on the stoop starts to grow weeds and crumble. The basil plant gets bigger, the dust on the shelf gets thicker, and the water stain on the ceiling expands to look like a dinosaur. We note these changes with surprise, as if they’ve happened all of a sudden instead of one day at a time.

On Navigating Grief During the Isolation of Quarantine

I read about the third suicide that had happened while we were in quarantine via email from my supervisor.

“I apologize for my absence. As some of you may have heard, my brother committed suicide over the weekend, and my family and I have been grieving this loss.”

I wrote back to the mass email individually saying how sorry I was for her loss, and that I, too, had suffered a loss at this time. Within the last month, I had lost my uncle to a surgery that left him paralyzed for weeks in the hospital. Alone. Without family. And that that had filled my heart with grief in a confusing time that didn’t allow people to gather and grieve the loss of a loved one. Let alone, let them say goodbye.

No Man Is An Island: An Ode to Our Neediness

The last few years of my life—so basically my Full Grown Adult Years—have been a reinforced lesson in this one simple yet slightly-jarring fact: we need each other. I mean, need-NEED each other.

“No man is an island,” says Thomas Merton, and my bae C.S. Lewis backs this up further by writing, “We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.”

We’re meant to be needy, but why is it so hard to acknowledge and accept this?

Say What You Need

Now maybe it wasn’t your family or your upbringing that made you neglect voicing your needs. Maybe it was a toxic relationship or a difficult work environment. Maybe it was someone who told you that your needs were selfish or that the desires of your heart didn’t matter.

Whatever it was, I urge you to identify those people or experiences or situations and start using that knowledge to change.

A Beginner's Guide to the Enneagram

Maybe you, like me, have become curious about the Enneagram because it is popping up everywhere in conversations and on your social media timeline. Maybe you know everything there is to know and have become quite fluent in Ennea-lingo (you even know that there are sub-types!).

Maybe this is the first time you’re ever hearing about this weird test and you’ve spent the last four paragraphs trying to figure out how to even pronounce the word “Enneagram” (In-ee-a-gram, for the record).

No matter where you’re at, we can all use some guidelines when it comes to personality tests, because none of us are immune to over-identifying, self-shaming, and becoming a walking personality-test-fulfilling prophesy. So, without further ado, here are my dos and don’ts of Enneagram-ing.

The Battle to Overcome Your Rejection

Rejection is an issue I’ve had to wrestle hard with over the last three years. Every time Rejection and I had to face off in the boxing arena, I would always end up slammed and pinned down. In boxing, you have ten seconds to get yourself up before the game is over. For me, it took months before I could even peel my head off the floor.

How to Respond to Someone Else's Grief

But this post isn't about my own grief. It's not about the tears I've cried, or the questions I've asked. It’s not about my own days where getting out of bed felt too hard.

It's about a different side of the fight. It's about your mom's grief when she loses her college roommate. And your best friend after she has a miscarriage. It’s about all the people you encounter, telling you about their grief.

Health, RelationshipsAmanda BeadlescombSeptember 19, 2017FeaturedComment