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@edmund-lloyd-fletcher, I’m no expert in first-person (I likewise generally detest it), but I’ll give it a shot.

So, as you astutely observed, first-person by its very nature violates the rule of “show don’t tell.” However, it’s important to remember why that rule exists and what it primarily refers to – that is, things that we can’t literally see, but we can figuratively see. For example, an anxious man beneath a flickering street lamp. We don’t know he’s anxious because he’s got a sign on his head saying, “Bob is / was anxious.” But we can tell at a glance by his hunched shoulders, hands shoved deep in his pockets, by his bent head and his eyes swiveling back and forth and forth and back like the pendulum of a clock, not to mention his tremulous stammer as he croaks out a shaky, “W-who’s there? What do y-you want?” We show the things we can’t literally see by telling the audience the things they can see.

But if Bob crosses the street, well, unless something particularly exciting happens along the way, a simple, “Bob crossed the street,” will suffice, with maybe a little adverb or a conjunction to accentuate the aforementioned anxious demeanor.

Think about how you’d tell a story to a friend about that time you thought you saw an alien monster in the street, only for it to turn out to be a plastic bag (I am being fictitious here, I don’t know if Edmund has seen any aliens lately).

“So I was walking to the 7-Eleven and I saw this thing blowing along down the street, right -” (I took a gulp from my two liter to wet my whistle) “- and I guess it was just a funny shape or the light caught it funny, and I coulda sworn it looked like some six legged thing, all glisteny and what not, slime drippin’ off it and six mean blue eyes, glowing like little LEDs. Crazy, right? Looked again, realized it was just a bag, some plastic grocery bag caught on a stick in the road. So I shook it off, walked in the 7-Eleven, got me a six pack and this here two liter, walked back out. Bag was still there, no lights though. So I walked back, maybe had me a little drinky drink – was about halfway back when there’s this rustling behind me, and I see this thing again – no lights but I could see it just had this shape to it, but it was dark, and I knew I was a little tipsy, so I turned back around – maybe it would go away. But I just felt something – y’know, one of them hair raisers, so I took the safety off my Glock, just in case. I had the shakes bad, and the 2L was awful cold too, so I kept drinking – steady the nerves – and I was taking another swig when I just hear this screech behind me like Satan’s pet cricket, so I just hucked that six pack at it and I whipped out my Glock and I unloaded on it, fed it seventeen servings of hot lead while I booked it back to the house. I dunno what that thing was, but I didn’t see it the rest of the way home.” (I finished the two liter and tossed it away.) “So anyways, that’s why my big toe’s missing. Come to think of it, that’s also probably why the police are outside. Got any more pop?”

In first-person stories, you in many ways get a reprieve from the rule of show don’t tell – you are in the character’s head after all. However, even characters sometimes don’t know themselves as well as the author does, and so you can play with your first person character being an unreliable narrator, or deliberately avoiding uncomfortable admissions – but that’s another topic.

Now, that said, the approach I outlined above tackles this from a past-tense perspective – the narrator / character is basically relating their story as an anecdote, looking back at it all from an undisclosed future point as an autobiographical experience. However, that sort of anecdotal style might be difficult to sustain for a longer project. One amusing (though unfortunately very profane) example from Soviet dissident literature is Москва-Петушки, or Moscow to the End of the Line, by Venedikt Yerofeyev, the drunkenly told story of an absolutely smashed narrator of his journey on the Moscow metro to meet his girlfriend and child in the suburb of Petushki. Along the way, he discloses how he was fired from his job as a cable layer, gets thrown out of numerous restaurants and bars, records a multitude of terrifying folk recipes for improvised moonshine, monologues about history and politics, gets in multiple arguments with both devils and angels, and may or may not actually be dead at the time of narration.

If you’re looking at more present-tense perspective – i.e., the protagonist is narrating to himself as he experiences the story and doesn’t already know how it’s going to end – there’s some subtle differences between that and the aforementioned autobiographical style. Tentatively, I would say that you could write the story in the same style as third person, just swap names and pronouns for “I”, but I feel like there’s surely more to that – more than I am currently qualified to speak about.

Hope this helps and wasn’t too pedantic.