Voices Carry

The people who were in such a hurry to tell you that they were fine with the early days of the lockdown because now they didn't have to deal with--ugh!--people because they were just, my god, such introverts anyway, it's not that I didn't believe them, it's just that they're amoral monsters and contemptible goddamned liars. That's sounds a little harsh maybe, but the fact that I know anything about these people at all (from social media, from text exchanges, from the times when you can't get them to shut the fuck up) is all the evidence you need. The oxymoron of performative introversion is enough to justify the judgiest of judgey judgeness.

We live in a country* where extroverts make all the rules, which makes sense. The input that gets the most weight tends to be the input from the people who didn't throw themselves into janitor closets to avoid speaking with an approaching stranger. Or someone they know. Or very close friends. It's hard to have your voice included when 90% of your energy is spent trying to make sure it's never actually used.

If instagram and facebook are any indication, the public-facing newly minted introverts spent a lot of the lockdown posting stories about how much they were enjoying all the isolation and quiet, usually with likeminded others in Zoom happenings or instagram live events. Look how alone we all are, together! Sometimes all you need to bring people together is a collective cognitive dissonance.

I understand that I'm using a public platform to declare my bona fides as an introvert vs. people who use their public platforms to make declarations of their own introversion. For every actual introvert there's another level of mole-human lurking in the e-darkness, blinking their lamp-eyes and shaking their heads, quietly not leaving comments...

The actual result of the 18-or-so months of public, professional and personal isolation has actually been... way too good. I spent a significant period of my teens, twenties and a meaty chunk of my thirties refining and implementing strategies to avoid human interaction. And the circumstances of accidental professional development and having a family meant I spent the next 10-plus years trying to unlearn every instinct I was born with, to become the most vile of things, a participatory member of a human society. Through all that slow arc of change (I refuse to characterize the arc as upward or progress... that would mean admitting introversion is some kind of failing, which, you know, fuck off), I subconsciously developed strategies to suppress or at least survive the panic spikes that accompany the crippling and inevitable onset of self-consciousness, second guessing and subsequent flagellation.**

I was not prepared for how much I was going to enjoy lockdown. At the same time, it was not as scary as it should have been to feel myself revert (not regress, again, fuck your qualitative privileging of the Frat Boy Standard) to being profoundly not lonely while being alone. The relief of isolation is a dopamine flood I'd happily drown in.

All that said, and for no one else's reasons but my own, I've gone out this week to try and re-establish connections. What makes this easy is that a) I have an introvert's number of friends, which means comfortable single digits and b) all the people involved tend to be introverts as well, which means instead of the promised bacchanal of Tits Out Summer, it's quiet lunches in houses and apartments taking turns pointing to pictures on our phones. It's not a party in any recognizable way, except for all the ways it totally fucking is.

Luckily the pandemic didn't last long enough at full force for me to forget what I'd learned in the last decade or so. Of course the other aspect of being American is co-habiting with a people determined to undo progress. So when the Delta Variant mutates into actual monsters with arms and legs and runs out of unvaccinated rubes to snack on, provoking another, bloodier, longer lockdown, I know there will be parts of it I'll actually enjoy (survival permitting).

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*If you're an American reading this. But knowing extroverts as I do, I suspect also if you're not.

**The last part lasts in some range between immediate and forever. Some shit that happened in third grade is still fuel for a fit of near-epileptic cringe.