These past 2 weeks of intense socializing (at least for this 6 year hermit) have cracked something open. I am discovering new things about myself now.
I don’t know when it happened but at some point around 6-8 years ago I made the flip from extrovert to introvert. I started avoiding unwarranted conversations and feeling more comfortable in front of a computer screen.
I wasn’t sure the entire reason why I flipped but I think I’m finally starting to understand.
A large part of it was due to health reasons and not having much physical or mental energy. I was aware of that much. I was also aware that I had become more focused on my own projects and that they required a lot more private time.
What wasn’t abundantly clear to me though was why basic human interaction started to feel stressful to me. I stopped wanting to go anywhere, stopped wanting to meet anyone and would rather play a game than socialize. I wouldn't say I was happy doing that, I just felt safe. I knew that no one would disturb me if I was alone in my room, and I DID NOT WANT TO BE DISTURBED.
This was obviously about more than just energy levels and wanting to work on my own projects.
At some point I had become tired of people.
Why though? Why didn’t I feel this way when I was younger?
As I walked through the more rural streets of the outskirts of the city, after an interaction with a restaurant owner who wanted nothing more than to practice his English with me, it dawned on me...I DID feel this way when I was younger.
I have always felt this way, but over the years I developed thick skin and my hope for a meaningful connection with people outweighed my social anxiety. I could push myself to deal with the bullshit if it meant sometimes having a nice experience.
The only thing that changed was that I became more tired of the bullshit. At some point I had unconsciously decided that it had become too hard to find the meaningful connections and pleasant surprises and I retreated into my shell.
The change had something to do with both gentrification and the way people started putting more energy into their digital lives than their physical lives.
I think my anxiety was exacerbated by other people’s anxiety.
But rather than focus on that, I want to understand the seed of this anxiety. As I walked (in the rain) from the restaurant to a book store/organic cafe, I thought about it. This can't be unique to me, in fact, I think this might be something a majority or a large minority experiences.
Why was I socially anxious in the first place?
Last week I talked to a bunch of strangers on two separate occasions and I realized just how overbearing people can be. We are an intense and emotional species. Some of them had nothing but questions, some had absolutely nothing to say and left me wondering if I made them uncomfortable, some just wanted to talk about themselves.
More than half the people I met seemed to "cost" energy. Perhaps it's my fault for leaking energy and they didn't have to cost anything, but still, it wasn't easy or comfortable naturally. I could feel their baggage and because I don't have many interactions with strangers now, I guess I took it to heart. I need to have more interactions with strangers so that I don't care.
This word “empath” gets thown around a lot by new age people, almost as a flex. “I’m an empath!”. I’m calling bullshit! We are all empaths. It’s just a matter of how in touch we are with our own sensitivities to recognize the way we pick up on the vibes of other people. If we dig deep enough we discover that our friends, the news, the values of society, they all affect each and everyone one of us to a profound degree.
I realized that a majority of people I meet are not capable of dancing with others. They don’t know how to comfortably mix their energy with the energy of another person, and it gets harder and harder in groups.
You tend to have the talkers and the non-talkers. People who only know to talk and others who only know how to listen (or pretend to listen) and are afraid or uneasy about sharing anything about themselves. The introvert and the extrovert.
This is true in all cultures. In western countries the society is dominated by the talkers, and the non-talkers are made to feel like they are the only one’s out of balance. In Asia it can be dominated by the non-talkers who just (often grudgingly) follow the strongest person in the group without saying much .
Both can be incredibly uncomfortable and that’s why I prefer to be around people who have lived in more than one cultures and belong to all or none of them, or people who desire to be free from cultural restrictions.
I find the only way to create balance is to create new cultures that are conducive to it because mainstream culture is generally not, no matter what part of the world you are from.
So we are all empaths.
We just have so many kinds of input that we lose sight of which of our emotions are influenced by which stimuli. Some of us even lose track of which of these are wanted and which are unwanted.
So for me, an introverted person is someone who recognizes that the energy of others is too much for them and they feel the need to isolate themselves to protect, maintain, or find their own vibe. Extroverts tend to be people who haven’t even discovered the degree to which they are influenced, or who have no idea what they want to keep or maintain or throw away. They don’t even know that they are tired.
I suspect that if everything is flowing well, we are neither extroverts or introverts, we ebb and flow like the ocean. Under certain conditions any of us can lean too far towards extroversion or introversion depending on how safe/unsafe and fulfilled/unfulfilled we feel in different areas of our life, and that to be truly balanced is to sway back and forth according to a flow of input and output, but this may be a topic for another post.
In any case, I am trying to revisit the discomfort I've felt in my life around just being around people with heavy baggage. That baggage came in so many flavors. People who wanted me to be more like them, people who looked down on me for being different, people who wanted attention, people who destroyed our relationship because of their own self hatred, people who were jealous and treated me unfairly as a result, people who used me for their own selfish purposes, people who didn't understand me and treated me as something bad, people who tried to intimidate me to hide their own insecurities, people who mixed their love with complicated other emotions that were uncomfortable and unfair to push onto me.
Why dig into these experiences? Because some of the emotions I felt still reside within my body and I'd like to clear them out. I want to forgive all these people, not for their sake but for my own, for my health and to be feel more energized, to patch up a leak. I want to become someone who can heal themselves of anything and who encourages others to do the same.
Fun stuff :-)
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