Inside the human mind is a strange and wonderful place. Humans are social creatures: we are designed to support one another, not to exist alone. These last few months have brought this to the top of consciousness in a way I never expected.
I spent this last weekend at a writer’s retreat. It was not a con – and certainly not a con by the time the thing had to be rescheduled due to mass isolation, then limited in number due to many people being unable to travel – but what it was was people getting together. I had been looking forward to it for more than a year. I try not to complain about it, but I suspect my regular readers know that I have my family (who I love very much, but… I’ll come back to this in a minute) and that’s it, in physical local proximity. This is, even for an introvert, difficult.
The First Reader is an obligate introvert. He doesn’t even do well at cons for three days, when he likes the people there and wants to be there. He gets peopled out much earlier than I do. But he does have a close friend we get to see a couple of times a month, and the two of them will sit and chat for hours. The First Reader, for all he is an island to himself, needs this limited social interaction. Almost all human beings do better with some social, even us hyper-adjusted to the modern world where you just don’t have the kinds of ‘belonging’ that our ancestors did.
I was doing research on the effects of long-term social isolation and loneliness early this year. I was having a rough time, and I knew some of it was my own lack of having friends I could talk to. Truly talk to. One of the things I remarked on about the writing retreat was the ability to have a conversation about anything and everything without having to filter myself. I could trust the people I was talking to. Not that I was going to censor bad language or badthink… no. I could trust them to understand me, without the need to explain. I could and we did! discuss darn near any topic under the sun. There was banter, there were jokes, there were serious scientific conversations. It was glorious. And now I am back at home and again contemplating those effects of loneliness. My children are my children. We are reaching a point in our lives where we can have amazing conversations, but they are not yet fully adult and I am still their mother, not just a friend. I shall always be their mother. My husband and I can and do spend a lot of time in one another’s company and enjoy it. Still.
We are going to see, in the fallout from the lockdowns, the toll it took on the mental and even physical health of those who were forcibly isolated during this time. Online interaction (and that, for those who were able to have it, as many were not) is insufficient. It helps. Oh, I know it helps. I spent years where that was my only option. It wasn’t until I was able to have the in-person friendships once a year or so that I saw the difference. The difficulty is that most of our society is, if not extroverted, unused to the isolation. It’s not an easy thing to live with. I know this from decades of personal experience.
Even when it all lets up. Well, most folks will return to something approaching a normal routine for them. I’m going to go back to what I was trying to figure out before the lockdown: how do I make friends and find people I can connect with in person without having to move? I can’t uproot the family for a minimum of three years. After that, all bets are off because I want to be healthy and whole and that means I need to put myself into some kind of proximity to my tribe.
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8 responses to “Social Creatures”
I suspect the lockdowns are driving more people to on-line communities for the reasons you give. And it is clear that being isolated makes many people more agitated. It is not yet clear what the overall impact on society of our current social experiments will be, but I do not doubt there will be some pretty visible ones.
On the issue of being comfortable sharing ones actual thoughts with others, which I think is at the heart of meaningful social interactions, I ran into this essay recently. It is more political than most of what I have seen in this community, but I suspect it will resonate with those here anyway. https://therightgeek.blogspot.com/2020/06/induced-learning-disabilities.html?m=1
I know the author well, and she is a teacher (a good one) so she knows whereof she speaks.
One of those conversations this weekend was focused on the effects of isolation on the elderly. Especially those restricted to nursing homes/assisted living facilities. It is tragic and terrible.
We were lucky with Mom and the nursing home.
She was going downhill mentally and was isolated at home (with just me there).
When we had to send her to the nursing home, the “girls” (nursing & care staff) were very good for her. It helped of course that Mom was easy to get along with even in her decline.
She’s gone now but I had to laugh whenever the “girls” talked about Mom being stubborn. Oh, Mom was “nice” in her stubborn moods but I worried about Mom being too passive (with me at home).
I had a friend who was moved into a nursing home from an assisted living home and then the Nursing home went into lockdown. He had been going downhill well not having any visitors made things worse he lasted a couple weeks.
As you said, I’m not getting even the small amount of social contact that I need.
I took the First Reader along, a month ago, to buy some plants from a local farmer. We got there and he was *chatty*. I stood there watching in realization that if *he* was that hungry for human contact, things were dire.
I understand that. I had a nice chat today with a young man in a store because he was wearing a Navy ballcap and so was I.
I don’t need more face-to-face chatter than can be gotten with, oh, a weekly trip for groceries where there’s minor interaction with other shoppers where you trade a smile. I never really had “people you can talk face to face with about non-polite-chatter” for most of my time growing up, but there’s still the need for interaction. Even flippin’ voice-chat for a D&D group works OK.
(I dislike phone calls so I don’t know if that would work otherwise, probably not, no shared goal beyond talk, and my family values silent companionship.)
But I still need Not Immediate Family socialization.
Really not helped by having hearing issues that make talking to the check-out ladies a chore, if they’re wearing a mask.