Aloneness means the world to me.
Introversion is a difficult thing to navigate. This is news to no one. The people I am around are well aware of my introversion's depths and shallows. I am occasionally gripped in manic depressive cycles of changing ferocity, but the underlying truth that forms the foundation of my being, core, and interactions is introversion. It's quiet. It's private. I rarely talk simply to talk. I often spend days without saying a word to anyone beyond the few cat noises I'll make to my pets. I don't like being around people for much time outside of a few hours, sometimes a half day, rarely a full day, but anxiety creeps in and introversion twists my nerves. I have to be left alone for regular and frequent stints of time.
Communication is a problem. Introverts can get trampled easily. I don't like fighting. I hate fighting. I hate arguing. At times I hate conversation, period. However, eschewing these things makes it difficult or impossible to express displeasure with people around you. Behold the reason why I will not go anywhere that I cannot remove myself from. Why argue, why fight, why bother explaining what and how you are feeling when you can simply leave? This works fantastically. When I am finished with you, I leave. When I have had enough of you, I leave. When I am bored, tired, happy, have other things to do, errands to run, when I feel like you've mislead me as to what we set out to do, don't like the venue, whatever may come up, I can quite easily say a pleasant goodbye to you and remove myself to my home and it's wonderful.
I'm not forced to be someone that I'm not, you're not forced to try to peer into what is going on behind my eyes and everyone is happy or at least content with the entirety of the interaction. I'm back home safe in my cocoon, your life goes on, nice and simple. When you come into my home, that dynamic is destroyed. When I am relying on you to get me back home or back to my car, that dynamic is destroyed. When you are in my home I am relying on you to leave in a timely fashion. When I am out with you, I am relying on you to not continue extending the day farther and farther away from an end point we agreed upon. Just because I keep acquiescing to your saying "hey, why don't we..." with the promise that we'll relax a little bit and have a little fun before taking me back to my car, doesn't mean that I'm not screaming inside every single time the "relax and have fun" part is pushed back another half hour and another half hour and another half hour. Eventually I will break.
You must take me home. You must get out of my house. And I've been trampled again. So which one is it? Are the people that do it not friends? Have they not known me long enough? Have they assumed that I've changed over the years? Do they not care? Do I put on a pleasant enough facade such that they don't notice until the entire thing breaks down in pieces and my grimace and crying eyes show? Why do they keep doing it? Because they can? I don't know. What are they not comprehending?
I've spoken to them a few times about it. What do they keep forgetting about me? It's strange. With people I'm not friends with, people I've only just met, circumstances unfamiliar, people I've known and can't trust, I leave nothing up to them to figure out. I rely on them for nothing. I believe very little of what they say. I come prepared for most any possibility and mode of extraction to protect myself from unintentional outside harm. You are supposed to be my friend, please don't step on me.
And on that note, what I cannot deal with is the friend whose comprehension skills are so incredibly underdeveloped I couldn't have an argument or disagreement with them if I tried with all of the tact, diplomacy, conscientiousness, and kindness I can muster.
We all have that friend who immediately flies off of the handle when you tell them they've done something wrong. That friend who will tell you that in the subjective world of right and wrong to you is something that they can dictate. That friend who tells you when they've helped you, regardless of what the actual result of their misguided effort was. That friend who you specifically instruct not to come over without an invitation from you, who takes it upon themselves to come to your house and scare all of your neighbors into believing something horrible has happened to you to get someone to open your door and enter your apartment because you fell asleep on the phone with them after staying up for 40 hours. That friend who says they came over to check on you without an invitation because they were not going to let a friend die on their watch, who immediately asks you upon arrival if you have anything to drink, who happens to have brought an overnight bag and their video game remote and parts, and their tiny bottle of liquor, when all you wanted to do and did was fall asleep. What the hell are you doing here? No, it's not funny. No, it's not heroic. No, it's not friendly. I was sleeping with my phone on silent because I am tired. That friend who mooches all of your food and beer over the next two days and destroys what sleep you were hoping to get while managing to leave your place trashed, who you tell not to come over again without an explicit invitation because "you fell asleep while I was talking to you and I had to make sure you weren't dead" is not a reason to invite yourself over to crash at someone's house for two and a half days and make your neighbors think you may die at any moment to trick your way in, that just do not understand that what they did was patently wrong. Regardless of how they contort their actions to fit some larger narrative of "I helped you."
No comprehension skills. The funniest part is when, as an introvert, giving yourself time to think the events over, you let them know what they did must not be done again. You explain to them it is hugely disruptive to your life and takes days of cleaning and rest to recover from and days of explaining and apologizing and discomfort with neighbors who now have no idea if this idiot will pop up on some random day demanding entry because I may be in some ambiguous danger and they've thrown on their hero cape (or just fucking sleeping or maybe just awake with my phone off or not even home) and their response is to get angry at you. Not only get angry at you, but insist that they will continue to ignore your wishes, disrespect your house, and treat you like a five-year-old who may slip and fall while running with scissors who must be constantly monitored. No comprehension skills.
You try to lay down very basic information, very basic tenets of how you would like friends to treat you and the space you want them to respect and they scream and yell at you about how wrong you are and how right they were to violate your space and how you'll live to regret and rue the day you told them how you felt and how you want to live your life and then go on to tell you they aren't going to respect your wishes or your space regardless.
So what do you do? Do you just scream and shout back at them? No, you're an introvert and they'll out yell you at every turn and out outrage you too. Do you try to restate your point and your needs? Nope, they've already shown they are not going to listen. Don't sweat it. Leave. Watch them from afar for a while. Feel free to leave them alone altogether for some time. Maybe they need time to understand better. They can't trample you and your introverted heart and mind if they can't interact with you. There is no fix for introversion. There is no fix for introversion. There is no fix for introversion.
There is no need to fix introversion. Take care with who you befriend. It is important to understand that, as an introvert, you can be liable to get hurt pretty badly, whether friends mean to or not. Relying on other people to learn how to treat you is a losing game. It's up to you as you grow older and more experienced in navigating introversion, to learn how to maintain proper distance from the people you do call friends. When it becomes too close, don't drive yourself to death trying to keep it together. Open up some space and go from there. You won't be sorry. You may feel like an awful person who is abandoning people that thought they were your friend. You may feel like something is wrong with you. You may feel, at first, that you're hurting people trying to help, but that subsides quickly once you see their blindness to your being for what it is.
///Richard Wagner - "
Das Rheingold Prelude" aloneness still means the world to me.
