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Also, these photos are old. They were taken in the month right between my concussion and figuring out I wasn't getting better. I also now have different hair so I need to post them and get them out of the queue. I have owned this spectacular suit for years and surprisingly have never done a blog post about it. In some photos it will look mustard, but it is definitely chartreuse. Because the main material is mustard, in some lights the reflect on it is mustard. In these photos, it definitely leans towards mustard. The jacquard fabric in it is cream and gold. It's from an independent designer and one of a kind. The designer is Opus Belle.
Now on to the topic at hand. Context here is that I was thinking about this topic due to being busy busy busy. I had a been job hunting, interviewing and started a new job. I also volunteer a fair bit around my working commitments. I'd been in a theatre production (more on that in another post) and was going straight from work to the theatre. The rental I have been living in sold so there were so many house inspections as part of the selling process. Both of my parents were ill enough to need care, so I helped them as much as I could. I had to travel to medical appointments with one parent, and also travel to my own medical appointment. I also had enrolled in my last unit at university and had a mountain of study to you. It has been the sort of busy time where I wish there were more hours in the day.
Just one of the things I was living through was a enough to be a major interruption on a person's life. I've been really proud of managing it all. Have I felt overwhelmed? You bet. It’s been an opportunity to practice trusting the work I’m putting in, living in the moment I’m in without letting all the pressures invade the other parts of my life. For example, if I’m at a medical appointment with my parent, I’m with them, attentive to their needs and giving that moment 100% of me. I’m not on my phone instead, I’m not thinking about the other things I need to be doing, I’m not responding to messages or emails about other stuff.
During this period I saw a post on Threads that was scathing of people who don’t message other people back. I can’t even recall the wording, because I’ve seen a few of them in the past. It’s usually the same tone and some form of ‘if that person can be scrolling Instagram, they can be replying to you, you’re justified in being annoyed because this person is being a jerk’.
I can’t help but laugh at this belief. So while trying think of what on earth to actually write for a blog post, this popped into my head and I thought, why not?
There are a long list of reasons why people don’t message back, and I’d even go so far as to say there are reasons why they shouldn’t. While I was recovering from my acquired brain injury, I had a not insignificant number of people become hostile when I did not respond immediately to messages because I couldn’t. It took me weeks sometimes. It taught me some really valuable stuff that I carry with me today.
To start, no body is entitled to access to other people.
For tens of thousands of years human beings have lived in a world where communication could only occur occasionally and in person. Technology gathered momentum with writing, printing, letters and then came electronics. Telephones, radio, tv. And then mobile phones. And now smart phones. When radio and TV first came into existence, they did not have 24 hour programming. That’s new technology. They had scheduled programming that people made time to engage with the content. Now it’s background noise. Phones have always had etiquette around when it’s an inappropriate time to call someone. Even now, ringing without prior agreement after 9pm is pretty out of pocket. Yet now we have messages. And they come in whenever. They come in from every angle on so many platforms. Each platform has its own notifications. I want to spend less time on my phone. I don’t have notifications on for anything other than calls, SMS, and important emails. Everything else must wait its turn. Every person I know shouldn’t have the access to interrupt my day, life and space to send a notification demanding immediate attention. We all have the right to decide who has access to us and when.
In healthy communication, no one owes anyone a response.
Healthy communication remembers that all the people around us have brilliant, busy, complex lives. We are not the only other people in their world. When a person doesn’t respond, some people might feel hurt and rejected, but (and this might sting a little) in most cases those people are choosing that hurt. That offense comes from attaching to the communication un-discussed expectations that the other person might not have agreed to. Even if they have agreed to them, healthy communication allows the other party to be responsible for their actions without you taking it on for them. There is usually always a way to send a communication so that your emotions aren’t hostage to a response. Our emotions are our own responsibility and it is manipulative and unfair to put them onto another person. Let me give you an example of two text options to send to someone who is, for whatever reason, a slow responder.
“Would you like to go the Banana concert on Saturday with me?”
or
“I’m going to the Banana concert on Saturday and thought you might like to come. If you’re keen, let me know by Tuesday.”
Anecdotally, I remember once I received a love letter in the post from someone from work (ignore that part because that’s a whole thing in itself and not the point of this example). It arrived the week my grandmother died. I took some days off work for the funeral planning with my family. While I was at home, sitting at the piano composing the song I would sing at her funeral, I got an angry text from the love letter sender telling me how rude I was and that they were owed a response. I don’t get angry often, but I let this person have it. How dare they, someone aware I was absent from our workplace due to a family death, message me in the time I had taken for that grief asserting that I had behaved poorly to them. I told them I would respond when I felt like it, which might even be never, and to never make such an outrageous overstep again.
Expecting an immediate response is ableist
Not everyone can reply immediately. Not only are able bodied people living lives that they have every right to prioritise, many people are managing other challenges like acquired brain injuries, depression, caring responsibilities, neurodivergence, anxiety and more. Finding the right words, thinking about availability, structuring sentences, staring at a screen, these all put an energy demand on the brain. Any person that does not have a fully resourced brain has the right to be protected by the grace we should give to EVERYONE that a response can come when they are ready. Importantly, this is the same grace you offer to everyone because you cannot know what a person is living with. No person should have to disclose personal medical or other information in order for you to not be a wanker. You can communicate with people as though you have empathy to begin with, without them having to explain why that is needed.
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Anything else is allowed to be a priority before replying
We all deserve the chance to switch off and recharge. This could be putting a phone somewhere we won’t see it. This could be scrolling on the very phone people are trying to contact us on. Each person is entitled to that off time where they don’t have to engage socially. If their life is very full and they have limited communication time, the time that they do have will likely be allocated to the people and things that fill their cup. For me, I’m always very responsive to my family members. It immediately alerts me if a person is expecting me to be more responsive to them than my own family. This always stands out more when I’m so busy I get limited family time. If I have limited time, my family will come first and everything else must wait.
Many people are ok with accepting that if someone has something important to prioritise, then their delay in responding is justified. But like the general example given above regarding scrolling instagram, it is important to remember that people deserve rest and downtime too. You wouldn’t march into a persons home, stand over them as they are snuggled up in bed and take their phone out of their hand to demand a reply. When someone is replying to you, they are interrupting their life to put you into it. Everyone deserves time with themselves uninterrupted by the wants and needs of others. For many people, that’s a rare thing. Where a response expectation gets inappropriate is in making a personal choice to attach our worth to their response, particularly by framing it as ‘if we are a priority, they will demonstrate that by prioritising us over themselves’. If expecting a person to prioritise us over their significant life matters, that is incredibly selfish. If expecting a person to prioritise us over themselves and their own rest, that is demanding self abandonment from them in favour of our ego. It’s emotionally manipulative and inappropriate.
Each person’s space and life is their own. Access to that demands respect.
Did they even see your message?
If I’m using my phone for something, like checking my calendar or making an appointment, the moment I open it, the lock screen clears notifications. I’m also one of those people who has hundreds of red number notifications above my message inbox. I know there are people who clutch pearls about this, so let me say, I do not care. There are so many things on this earth that I can care about. Making sure I’ve read every spam text message that comes in is so not remotely near my list of cares. Letting go of that also requires letting go of the message notification numbers. If you’re sitting there thinking that I should just delete those messages as they come in, remember how I said people shouldn’t be entitled to interrupt our lives to get an immediate response? That applies to spam messages about sales for companies who scraped my mobile data somewhere. I do my very best to get to all the messages I receive. I’m human. I sometimes miss notifications when I’m being my best self in the real world.
I recently had a comment go viral on someone’s reel. People keep sharing it to their stories and replying to it. My Instagram notifications are a mess. My Instagram inbox is chaos. I try to prioritise business related messages but they don’t always get through for me to even see them.
I do my very best to reply to important messages and will always try to make amends if I accidentally miss one. However, something I don’t feel obliged to be sorry for is missing a reply to something that isn’t important. Has a person not responded to a reel you sent them? That would be a silly thing to take offense to, even if they are active on the app. Seeing or replying to casual stuff isn’t an appropriate thing to tangle up with assumptions on how a person feels about you.
Why assume the worst when you could assume nothing?
At one point while recovering from the head injury, I got back-to-back infections with flu and then covid. I was really sick and struggling to juggle all my responsibilities for a few weeks with my very limited capacity. Someone messaged me and asked if I wanted to do something and I had no brain left over to form the words to reply. Before I had the chance to respond (and at this point it would reasonably take days to weeks) they had sent me a few more, called me many names, aggressively reacted to my apparent hate for them and hoped I was happy with losing them as a friend for whatever reason I hated them for. Obviously, I didn't hate them, I was unwell and my brain was over capacity.
I thought about replying when I was well enough, but actually chose not to. If someone is going to be so hostile, unsafe, and energy demanding when I’m at my worst, then they shouldn’t be in my life. They seemed like the sort of person who, after having attached their own assumptions to the delay without any evidence, would do the same to the actual explanation anyway. Essentially, they just ended our friendship purely by assuming something. Their life experience painted a picture that wasn’t even there.
This has reminded me of a time I accidentally left my phone at work. I had been texting a friend at lunch that we would meet after work at a time we would choose later to hang out. By the time I realised I had left my phone behind and got back to my work an hour later to collect it, it had over 80 missed calls. Now, you would have thought that after the first two or three that they might have realised I wasn’t going to pick up and that they might have to wait to get more information as to why. If I were the person waiting, I’d leave it until a reasonable hour, assume something had come up and make plans for myself. If they then contacted me, I’d let them know what I had adjusted to and invite them to join if they wanted. There are so many reasons why a person might not respond in this scenario. Obviously in my case, I left my phone at work. Other plausible reasons could include, I was so tired I fell asleep after work, my phone went flat, I dropped my phone in the sink or the toilet, I wrote a message and it didn’t send, I accidentally put my phone on silent, I was in the shower, I had to unexpectedly stay late at work. Whatever the scenario, it wasn’t my responsibility to soothe this person or apologise for distress they caused themselves.
Anyhoo, this was all written at the time it was relevant a couple of months ago. I'm posting now to get back into the flow with regular blog posts. I'm also being lazy and not writing an ending to wrap it all up.
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