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 showing over 10K unread messages. (Yes, I have an inbox problem). 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. If we go quiet by choice we are difficult. And then there are those of us who try to protect our time and are considered self-absorbed, 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.