Since I’ve used the Superman/Supergirl comparison in the past, I thought it might be an apt theme for today’s discussion – because right now we are all in our own Fortress of Solitude, whether we want to be or not.
At least a fortress in an ice cave is beautiful. But cold!
Even those of us who identify as introverts, who enjoy the peace and quiet of our own company, who find social interactions and especially crowds to be draining? Yeah, even we are realizing that there is such a thing as too much solitude. The extroverts around us are suffering acutely as the restrictions on their social interactions have continued.
The isolation imposed on us by the pandemic raging around the globe is overwhelming our sense of well-being. I am seeing it in people I never expected to be as seriously affected as they are.
Recently I phoned a friend. I knew they were an introvert and fully expected to get voice mail and a return call when they were up to a chat. But instead of a return call within a day or two, I received an email a few days later that said, in effect, “I can’t cope with the phone.”
Ignoring a ringing telephone can be difficult, but turning the ringer down or leaving it in the other room solves the problem. Temporarily.
Honestly, that shook me to the core.
My husband is a serious introvert. He doesn’t like crowds, or having to make small talk with people he doesn’t know, but he does like to get out of the house, to walk around the local casino, or the grocery store. He likes the occasional presence of other people, even if he doesn’t want to directly interact with them, and even that outlet is no longer available to him. I can see it wearing on him, fraying his nerves and leaving him restless and unsettled.
I touched on this last week when I wrote about my well of creativity running dry. I had columns I could have posted. They were completed and run through my review board, ready to go.
But it felt like it was important to address the very real issue facing each of us every day as we try to negotiate the minefield that is the constant threat of a highly-contagious and life-threatening disease.
I have thought a lot about this in the last week, as well as in the weeks leading up to that post. My retirement was carefully planned and I was in the process of putting those plans into action when our world crashed headlong into a virus that didn’t give a damn about our plans.
We’ve distanced, and masked, and washed our hands thousands of times in the last year. We’ve used gallons of hand sanitizer, wiped down our grocery carts, given up restaurant meals, and not ventured more than a few miles from home. And we have maintained that vigilance for the last year.
It has taken its toll. While we have all experienced isolation in our lives, very few of us have experienced it this deeply, for as a long a time, and under such incredible threat. Combine that with a major life change (like retirement) and it becomes a perfect storm of emotional and physical stress.
Social distancing has removed so many of the small, organic personal interactions we normally experience. Exchanging greetings with a friend or neighbor in the supermarket? With one-way aisles you’re not as likely to see someone you know. Share small talk with a cashier? They’re behind a shield, and just trying to keep the line moving to lessen their exposure. Smile at someone you pass on your daily walk? With a mask they will never see your smile, and you won’t see them return it. The people you normally see at the gym? If your gym is even open, you make an appointment and keep your distance. Chat with a co-worker? Not when you’re 6 feet away, so that your conversation is shared with anyone in the vicinity.
Even the groceries are maintaining the proper social distancing!
In short, we do not interact with other humans in any normal manner. Every encounter is distant, rushed, and fraught with possibility for disaster.
I have talked privately with several people since last week’s post. Many of them had suggestions, tricks that they were using to maintain some social contacts, ways of filling the emotional well that helps fuel creativity. Some of them were new to me, and some were things I have been doing for months.
For instance, my kids’ birthdays were early on in the pandemic. We had Zoom-call birthday parties with friends and family. We could see and talk to each other, though it wasn’t quite the same.
My kids are gamers; my son is active in the gaming community, even helping run game conventions – even dealing with the challenge of running them virtually this year. But he missed the opportunity to hang out with friends and family and play games. We worked out a way to log into an online board game site while on a Zoom call, and have spent many evenings at our computers. As a bonus, we have learned a lot of new games.
This is one of the new games we found on BoardGamesArena. How could you NOT try something called Battlesheep?
One of my friends has scheduled a daily call with their elderly parent since they are unable to visit in person. Another checks in with a co-worker even though they work from home and regularly see each other in work calls.
We have had guests a few times, during the good weather when we could sit outside in a wide circle of lawn chairs, distant and masked. We will again when weather permits.
What underlies each and every one of the suggestions was the need for mindfulness. We have had to create opportunities to interact with our friends and families, and to create even more opportunities than we might have before. We need to not only maintain our social contacts, but to increase them in order to replace those small, organic interactions that happened every day.
For now, those consciously-created interactions are taking the place of dozens of tiny connections that we made every day. And it is the loss of those myriad fleeting moments, even with strangers, that is reinforcing the sense of isolation that is draining our emotional wells.
I hope your schedule doesn't look quite this crowded, but there should be at least a few human contacts on there. Yes, you need them on the schedule since they won't happen the way they used to.
So until the time when we can resume at least some of our usual activities we need to be aware of our need for social interaction and to take a mindful approach to making sure we fill that well with human contact in whatever way we can. For now, we can’t expect these encounters to happen naturally in the course of our day, we have to make them happen.
And maybe this is a lesson we can take with us into whatever the “new normal” will be.