Make Room
There are two kinds of people walking around this earth.
There's the Tiggers. Bouncing, present, convinced the next thing is going to be wonderful.
And there's the Eeyores. Tail dragging, clouds gathering, muttering that nobody ever tells him anything and that it probably wouldn't matter if they did.
Here's the part that'll sting a little: most Eeyores don't know they're Eeyores. They think they're realists. They think the rest of us just got luckier.
They'll sit at the back of the struggle bus and list, in tremendous detail, every reason they can't get off. They've made a career of the list. They've laminated it.
Walk into the room where they're holding court and watch the faces of the people who love them. Those people know. The second an Eeyore opens their mouth, everyone quietly reaches for their umbrella.
The Eeyore doesn't lack intelligence. Doesn't lack talent. What they lack is room. Every hour is spoken for by the wrong things. And increasingly, those wrong things have a screen attached to them.
Glowing, buzzing, endlessly refreshing, offering the sensation of living without the inconvenience of actually doing it.
Every inch of mental real estate occupied, every quiet moment colonized before it can become something useful. They can't find their people, can't find their community, can't find themselves ... because they've left no space for any of those things to walk through the door.
I know this because I was one of them.
...
Not all the way. I wasn't checking every box on the Eeyore inventory. But in my first year of university, I had given myself over to the trap completely.
Thursday through Sunday I drank. Weeknights I'd hustle back to my dorm room, told myself I deserved a break, and scrolled Facebook, watched porn or watched Family Guy until I could pretend I hadn't been running from my coursework. The screen was always there.
Faithful, judgement-free, asking nothing of me.
That was exactly the problem. I had coasted through high school on whatever I was born with, and now I was surrounded by people who were brilliant and worked hard, and instead of rising to meet them, I retreated to a glowing rectangle and called it rest.
So I made excuses. I voiced them to anyone who'd listen. I got a C+ average and told myself the grades were happening to me.
Second year I sobered up, studied harder, lifted more ... and finished with a B-minus. I had done everything I thought was right and it made almost no difference.
What I hadn't touched was the screen. I'd just rearranged the deck chairs, trading beer for YouTube, parties for binge-watching, one numbing agent for another. I genuinely started to wonder if I just wasn't smart enough. If the university had made a clerical error letting me in.
Then something shifted.
I signed up for a summer course. Condensed. Focused. No room to hide.
And around the same time I found myself living temporarily with a group of international students. Different degrees, different countries, different years in school. Uniformly positive.
The kind of people who, when something went wrong, asked what now instead of why me. They had the "immigrant mindset". They wanted it.
I was surrounded, for the first time in my University career, by a little pocket of Tiggers. And something in me woke up.
I got my first A.
I'd love to tell you the rest was smooth sailing. It wasn't. I backslid. I beat myself up. But now I knew, in my bones, that I was capable. And that changed everything.
I started getting up and working out every morning. I started sitting at the front of class and getting genuinely curious instead of performing curiosity. I found a book called What Smart Students Know and read it like scripture. I used office hours. I took walks. I went outside.
And critically, I stopped letting screens eat the daylight and evening hours. Nothing after dinner. Nothing in the afternoon. Boredom, I discovered, is not the enemy. Boredom is the waiting room where good ideas and real connections go to sit until you're finally quiet enough to let them in.
I shed friendships built entirely around drinking. Nothing wrong with those people, just nothing there when the drinks were gone. I shed commitments that were really just inertia wearing a jersey. I went without a smartphone for a semester. Barely touched social media. When I wasn't studying I was outside, or talking to my roommates, or wandering Montreal on a free Sunday like I had nowhere better to be ... because I didn't, and I finally knew it.
I made room.
And here is what nobody tells you about making room: gratitude rushes in to fill it.
When the screen goes dark and the noise settles, you start to notice things. The roommate who always cleans up. The friend who checks in without being asked. The stranger who holds the door.
None of these registered before. They couldn't. The feed was too loud.
But in the quiet, they become vivid. And something in you softens toward them.
This is Pooh's great secret. Not Tigger's manic joy. That's borrowed energy, it burns out. Not Eeyore's loyal suffering. That's a full-time job with no benefits.
Pooh just wanders outside, snack in hand, fully present, and notices that the world has put rather a lot of good things in his path.
His friends. The honey. The particular quality of a Tuesday morning. He doesn't take inventory of what's missing. He gives thanks, quietly and completely, for what's there.
Gratitude, it turns out, is a magnet. When you start seeing the good people already in your life and telling them so ... not in a greeting-card way, but plainly, the way Pooh would ... they lean in closer.
And people watching from the outside see someone worth leaning toward. That is how community actually forms.
Not through grand gestures or perfectly curated profiles, but through someone putting the phone down, looking up, and saying I'm glad you're here.
You cannot do any of this while staring at a screen. The screen will not look back at you with warmth. It will not show up when things go sideways. It will offer you the simulation of connection ... the like, the reply, the notification that someone, somewhere, acknowledged your existence for a quarter of a second ... and it will do this so efficiently, so frictionlessly, that you'll reach for it instead of the real thing without even noticing you made a choice.
And that's the quiet tragedy of it.
Not that screens are evil. They're not. Not that the people on the other side of them aren't real. They are.
But there is something that happens between two people in the same room. A glance. A pause. A laugh that surprises both of them.
No notification could ever replicate this and you know this. You've felt it. The dinner where nobody checked their phone and the night ran long because nobody wanted it to end. The walk where you talked about something true. The moment someone said exactly the right thing because they were there, watching your face, reading the room.
That's what's waiting for you on the other side of the screen.
...
So put it down.
Not forever. The world has moved and the screen is part of it now, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of delusion. But put it down long enough to remember what's around you.
The actual, physical, breathing, irreplaceable things around you.
Long enough to acknowledge its place and return it to proportion, to make it a tool you reach for rather than a reflex you can't stop.
Long enough to sit in a moment without documenting it. Long enough to have a conversation that doesn't end when someone gets a notification.
Long enough to be bored, and restless, and then ... if you wait just a little past the restlessness ... genuinely present.
Long enough to live intentionally, because intention is the whole game.
Eeyore doesn't intend anything. He drifts, tail dragging, pulled along by whatever current the world provides. Tigger intends everything all at once, which is its own kind of chaos.
But Pooh? Pooh wakes up and decides. He decides to visit Piglet. He decides the morning is worth noticing. He decides, without fanfare and without a content strategy, that the people in his life are worth his full and unhurried attention.
That decision ... small, quiet, made fresh each morning ... is the whole staircase. You don't need to see where it leads. You just need to take the first step.
...
The old Eeyore version of me still surfaces, every now and again. I whack him back down. I'm better at it now. Because I know what feeds him: the scroll, the compare, the passive consumption of other people's highlight reels. And I know what starves him: a morning without a screen, a long walk, a real conversation, a moment of plain and honest gratitude for whoever is standing in front of me.
Make room. Let gratitude fill it. Watch who walks in.
You might be surprised how many people were waiting just outside the door, hoping you'd finally open it.