Stop Being So Damn Available
Going quiet—on your own terms—isn’t passive. It’s power.
→ Read the full essay on PROVOKED
Editor’s Note: Off-Script—the why, what, and oh sh*t moments behind this article.
I keep my phone close. I run a business, I have grown children with babies of their own, and there’s no version of my life where I disappear for a week and pretend the noise doesn’t exist. I want the texts, the calls, the photos. I even want the Saks email at 11 p.m. telling me about the sale I shouldn’t be checking out.
So no, this isn’t a piece about going off-grid. I’m not romantic about that and neither are most women I know.
But there’s a quieter problem underneath the noise that I think about a lot: the assumption that my availability is somehow proof that I care. That if I don’t reply quickly enough, often enough, warmly enough, something is wrong with me as a person.
Linda Wattier’s pitch came in during a week when my inbox was particularly heavy. Hers was the only one I didn’t want to disappear from. Probably because she was saying something I’d been resisting for a while.
Women aren’t expected to be available because we have the capacity. We’re expected to be available because being available is how we prove we’re good. A woman who doesn’t respond quickly is negligent. A woman who goes quiet by choice is difficult. A woman who protects her time is selfish, full of herself, or my favorite—checked out.
One reader wrote in: I’m exhausted from being everyone’s emotional ATM. That sentence has stuck with me.
Most of us aren’t lonely. We’re depleted. There’s a difference, and the difference is the whole point.
What Linda did, that I think no one else writing about this lately has done, is refuse to make quiet sound like a luxury. It isn’t a luxury. It isn’t a reward you earn after you’ve answered everyone else first. It’s a baseline.
Read the full piece. Then close the tab and don’t answer anything for an hour.
"I'm exhausted of being everyone's emotional ATM." Genius.