Why It’s Time to Stop “Paying Attention”

When I was in second grade, my teachers told my parents that I rarely seemed to be paying attention in class, but somehow I always seemed to know the answer when they called on me.

Usually, they said, I was staring out the window or messing with something in my desk while they explained the day’s material. I wouldn’t even watch when the explanation included a visual component. Clearly, I was daydreaming. Yet I always surprised them with my correct answers.

This story was told to me over and over throughout my childhood. Eventually, through that and other means, I absorbed that people are happier if you look at them while they’re talking, even if they’re addressing a group and there are already plenty of people looking at them. Weirdos.

Anyway. I didn’t even REALIZE how deeply I had internalized — and MET — this expectation, my whole life, until this week.

Post-Covid, as I shared on Facebook earlier this morning, left me with a HUGE basket of IDGAF tokens. A dump truck load, actually. Like. So many. A lifetime’s supply, plus extras for all the years I gave a fuck to things and people who didn’t deserve my fucks.

I sat in a quarterly leadership team meeting with the company I head up storytelling for on Thursday. Zoom is exhausting, usually. All that trying to look attentive while staring into the same box I’ve been staring into for hours already. All that nodding to show you’re paying attention. All that listening through seemingly endless discussions of matters that don’t involve you.

While the company I work for is a good one, the meetings always productive, and there’s no stated expectation to pay attention or even to keep the video on, nevertheless, the expectation was well internalized for me from childhood on.

Exhausting.

But I have a truck load of IDGAF tokens and by the gods I’m gonna use them.

So I didn’t look at my screen. I looked out my window and daydreamed.

I didn’t smile. I let my face rest.

I didn’t try to follow the thread when the meeting ambled, just in case something important happened.

I didn’t take notes to try to stay on task.

IDGAF. I just showed up and let my face do whatever my face wanted to do.

And you wanna know something?

I brought more value to that meeting than I think I have ever brought to a large meeting before. It was awe-inspiring to realize that all those years, I was putting an attentive look on my face and, thereby, actually ***detracting from my ability to process what was happening in the meeting***.

It’s almost as if faking uses up mental energy.

With my eyes focused on the quality of the light filtering through the large oak tree outside my window and the squirrel running along its branches, my brain was running on fuel instead of fumes.

With my mind free to rest and wander at will, it was also free to make the associations and pull the threads that it is so brilliant at pulling.

I felt like a spider in a well -spun and undamaged web, watching the light sparkle on a dew drop and attentive to everything and nothing, confident that when something happened that I needed to pay attention to, my whole being would know that vibration without effort and respond.

Y’all.

When we force and coerce young people into fitting the model of learning and paying attention that makes US happy, we rob them of their brilliance. We take something from them that is real and essential. We force them to use their precious life energy pleasing our arbitrary expectations, instead of on the things that actually matter.

It felt GOOD to sit in that meeting and not GAF.

I don’t mean that I don’t care about the people. But when IDGAF about what anyone thinks, or worry that they’ll think I don’t care because I’m not looking at them, because my face isn’t making the expected movements, because I’m not listening to the minutiae in hopes that some of it will matter, then -

My brain is like that spider. Resting. Calmly attentive. And it catches what it needs. And it brings what the team needs, too. Almost effortlessly.

And it feels GOOD.

Instead of sapping my energy, it fuels it.

I’ve known for a long time that I’m neurodivergent. But that moment, sitting there in that meeting, remembering what the teachers told my parents, and allowing my body to return to that child-like state, return to my natural way of being, return to the wandering, self-directed, relaxed, IDGAF state of being… I deeply understood how much it’s cost me to live in a world that demanded I make myself look normal.

How much weight was placed on my shoulders to look the way people expect me to look.

And we don’t even realize we’re doing it to children. We think we’re teaching them “good manners” “healthy habits” “how to pay attention” “how to do well in school.”

But sometimes all we’re teaching them is how to hide their brilliance under a pleasing facial expression.

(Photo credit: My mom. Model: My teenage self, well schooled in masking. I didn’t get a teenage dirt bag phase. I was too busy trying not to piss anyone off by not looking happy enough.)