There has – and I hope I’m not being too controversial when I say this – been very little to recommend the experience of a novel coronavirus sweeping the globe and upending life as we know it over the last two years. I stab the ‘Dislike’ button on it, hard. If Covid were an Airbnb venue, I would deliver a firm no star review. If it were an Instagram post, I would not heart it.
You get my drift, I’m sure. And yet, and yet. For a certain, traditionally overlooked, misunderstood section of the populace there has been one tiny sliver of saving grace to the whole thing. We introverts have had the world fall – albeit forcibly - into step with us.
Especially at Christmas time. Last Christmas was just dreadful, obviously, with no redeeming features. Whatever the government guidelines permitted, a vast number of people (including me, my shielding parents and my sister) took the decision to stay apart as we had been for months before that to protect each other. It was truly dismal. The overriding memory of Christmas 2020 will for most of my friends – and me – be of nipping outside or upstairs to have a brief cry away from the children and then plastering a smile back on before returning to family life so as not to spoil their day further.
This year, though… This year’s Yuletide is going to be better. This year I am planning to take everything I have learned and experienced over the last 20 or so months and use it to plant a marker in my life about how I want things to go from now on. And for once – though completely inadvertently – the government is going to help me.
The current (ever changing and tightening) restrictions are such that the trending mood is for a pared-down Christmas. And I can finally admit to myself that I am all for that. I can finally admit that although I was lucky enough to have a parade of magical family Christmases as a child, as a wife and 40-something mother of one the bloom is now very much off that winter rose.
Christmas as an adult, and especially as a wife and mother (and daughter of increasingly fragile parents), is hard work. The chances are that you do most of the domestic and emotional labour throughout the year anyway. But at Christmas those burdens – so heavy yet weirdly so invisible to others in the household – increase tenfold. You’re not shopping for occasional birthday presents but for Christmas gifts for all. You’re wrapping and labelling them, you’re writing cards, you’re standing in line at the post office, you’re planning and executing supermarket trips including the big pre-Christmas Eve shop, you’re sourcing nativity costumes for the children and trying to arrange everyone’s schedules and transport to see the goddamn play which is at two in the afternoon (if you’re lucky enough to be able to see it this year) when you should be at work trying to meet early deadlines… once again, I’m sure you get my drift.
As an introvert there is also the terrible burden of increased socialising to consider. For the avoidance of doubt: this has nothing to do with shyness. The clinical definition of an introvert is someone who is overall drained by spending time with people (especially those not well-known to us and/or in groups). Extroverts are restored and energised, especially by groups, especially by meeting new people. Christmas parties, housefuls of guests from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day and beyond, office drinks, quick coffees with people who want to squeeze in a visit before the New Year…hell, even conversations with strangers while everyone’s stuck in the post office queue – all of this is the stuff of life to them, while we introverts feel it as the kiss of death.
But if the pandemic has given us one thing, it is the societally sanctioned chance to say no. No to all of this. Or – to put it slightly more positively – the chance to say yes to only as much of this as we can cope with. This is it. This is our moment, our opportunity to perform the most radical act of self-care we can: enforcing our boundaries, protecting our limited resources, and putting our own needs first. Or, you know, at least on a par with everybody else’s.
Like the shops and pubs that used lockdown as a chance to do the refits they had long been wanting to do but never had the time for, I am trying to use the pandemic as an opportunity to reset my own life a bit. I didn’t realise until it all just…kinda…stopped, quite how difficult I find general socialising to be. I like to go out, sure – but on my own terms, with people I genuinely want to talk to and talk to properly, and with a not-going-out buffer of at least a week on each side of it. That’s my baseline, but it has got lost over the years. I’ve been trying to measure up to the ‘acceptable’ level of socialising, which of course is set by a world dominated (as it must be, given their temperaments) by extroverts.
It’s too much. I know that now. My Christmas gift to myself is to acknowledge that and re-organise my life and my priorities accordingly. And to know that it doesn’t make me a Grinch or an emotional Scrooge. It just makes me – me. And that’s okay. Fellow introverts, let me make this a present to you too. Go forth into 2022 on your own terms. It will leave you more to give in the end.
Are We Having Fun Yet? by Lucy Mangan is published by Souvenir Press at £16.99 hardback, ebook and audiobook