Lockdown has brought a lot of changes. Last week, I thought I’d become an introvert. I mean, I’ve always been a high-functioning introvert (someone who needs to be alone regularly to recharge), but I thought I’d become a fully- fledged, card-carrying, crowd-fearing, party- swerving, cave-loving hermit. I was actually perving over lochside cottages in the Highlands of Scotland on Rightmove. You know, just for a bit of breathing space. My friends could come and visit me once a year or so. It’d be grand.
Or would it? I think there’s a fair bit of self- deception afoot in these turbulent times. You get so used to not going out, it starts to feel like that ‘new normal’ everyone is talking about. I’d got so cosy in my life of solitude that when people began mentioning distanced dinners and Christmas (Christmas!) drinks, I started to get twitchy. It’s like my friend Holly said the other day about her dating life: ‘You know, I’ll miss Covid dating. It’s so pleasantly Victorian when it’s illegal for them to touch you and you just sit in the park at opposite ends of a bench, drinking your own drinks.’ I was feeling the same about friendship.
But I had a sneaking suspicion that it wasn’t really me. Could my antisocial outlook be... a habit? Maybe I was just finding comfort in the familiar. Maybe I had been forced to love the lockdown and I was trapped in a mindless devotion to what I knew.
So, I experimented on myself. I tried. I arranged more dates. I did a few small group outdoor things. I made more phonecalls (I hate phonecalls). I left more VoiceNotes (I love VoiceNotes). And you know what? I started to feel energised, not drained. I wanted to do it more. Every time I put the phone down or left a gathering, I arranged another, and another and another. Like a runner easing back into a jog after an injury, I felt like I was regaining my skills and my confidence. If the definition of an introvert is someone who gets energy from solitude, while an extrovert is someone who gets energy from other people, I was starting to find my social sweet spot again.
Lockdown turned us all into introverts. We have to get back into our comfort zones – which is not a comfortable task. It’s like reading. You can get out of practice. If I don’t read a book for a while, I find my reading skills fade and it takes me longer to read when I try it again. Whereas if I’m reading every day, I fly through books. It’s the same with socialising. Interaction is a muscle. You have to flex it, or it gets slack and tired. It wastes away.
The best thing is that however introverted or extroverted you naturally are, it feels like, when things settle, we’ll all be able to set a new baseline for how much socialising we can handle. I feel like I’ll be able to be more honest in future if I don’t want to go to an event or meet-up.
Looking back to BC (before coronavirus), I was living a life that was quite frantic and exhausting, where I felt pressured to say yes to everything, all the time. But when you’re starting over, you can rewrite the rules. Here’s to finding a better balance.