⏱️ 11 min read | Audio version coming soon
If there is an introvert spectrum to be measured on, and I’ve measured myself against all I know of, I am definitively on the asocial side. Not anti-social—I don’t usually want to destroy my fellow humans. I simply wish to avoid them.
Personality tests have labeled me an INTJ, an Enneagram 5, and an internet-diagnosed Aspie. On a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being an actual hermit in the woods and 10 being the epitome of Barbara Streisands’s “people who need people,” I am a 2. I have exactly two points’ worth of social energy that I reserve for my closest loved ones. Any other energy points I have are allotted for general adulting, work, and the occasional game of Running Charades.
I am often able to save up points in order to expend 8 at, say, a friend’s birthday party. Contrary to the impression I may be giving, I am quite capable of enjoying myself socially, especially if the circumstances are right—quiet music, if any at all, lounge-able seating, scrumptious food. But I am also quite capable of slipping into negative points where I’ll cancel my own birthday party on the day of, holing into an isolation chamber of Tempurpedic burrito design. I am the filling.
What’s funny to me is that I care quite deeply for individuals. Sometimes even People As a Whole. A more lenient view of my asocial tendencies would say it’s the intensity of my care that requires so much solitude to replenish. A less forgiving take? I hoard my energy—my “bandwidth,” as privileged Millennials like myself are wont to say—only for people and activities I feel refilled by, in real-time. Some call this healthy boundary-setting. Others call it selfishness.
I know how to turn on. I’ve studied body language, vocal inflection, and microexpressions to know how to feign delight, interest, and even sarcasm. Plus, I’ve had healthy doses of media training courtesy of NBC and Disney. While I wouldn’t say I’m a total curmudgeon, socializing does not come naturally to me. Curiosity does. I’ve learned most people are at first charmed by the curious and then put off when it leads to truths that are less than comfortable.
Despite my limited reserves and social anxieties—asocial anxieties?—I am very aware of my animalness. There is nothing special about me. I am not unique, rare, or mysterious. Yes, everybody’s an individual snowflake and all that. There is no other me and I am capable of contributing great things that only I can contribute. Blah blah. If these memes are true of everyone, then does that not prove that we’re all the same?
The point is: I may be introverted but I am not an anomaly exempt from the needs of being a sapien. A great ape cursed with enough self-awareness to feel shame and the fear of mortality but not intelligent enough to avoid committing shameful deeds or defeat death, though some are surely trying. At this, sapiens may one day succeed. Then, I would argue, we are no longer homo sapiens but homo deus, as my favorite author Yuval Noah Harari describes in his book of the same title.
But this blog post isn’t inspired by Harari. It’s inspired by another favorite author of mine: Jamie Lee Finch.
My friend Jamie published her bimonthly newsletter last weekend. Its subject title read: “How meeting my neighbors changed my life.”
I gulped. I don’t want my neighbors to change my life. I prefer them unseen and unheard.
Yet Jamie’s letter scratched the surface of my burial ground for how this preference came to be. I wrote back to her in a stream-of-consciousness morning haze. Before I share my response, here is the section of Jamie’s newsletter that most stood out to me:
Face-to-face, body-to-body interactions shape our sense of belonging. And the primary thing is: our nervous systems need them, require them, crave them. Our bodies have known this way of being, this type of human connection, for far longer than we have been asking them to forget in favor of app-based optimization and association.
There is so much power and pleasure in choosing to give your full presence to the living beings, human and non-human, in your own neighborhood. There is so much raw delight in knowing and trusting your neighbors because there is an art to the practice of gathering for gathering’s sake – not to spend money or witness a specific event. Not that those are bad things, I just think we’ve largely forgotten that they aren’t EVERYthing.
I have not only largely forgotten this primal wisdom. I have actively smothered it.
As someone who occasionally shares her growing out loud, below is my response to Jamie, condensed for clarity. You might think of it as, “A Brief Examination of How an Asocial Person Was Formed,” or, “Confessions of an Introvert,” or, “Self-Pitying Musings From a Reluctantly Awakening Reticent.”
For context, in case you don’t read Jamie’s newsletter in full (which I do recommend), she wrote of how she unexpectedly found community by opening herself up to the neighbors in her apartment complex. In her words, she fell “absolutely madly in love” with them over bonfires and barbeques, discovering the joy and human necessity of a term she coined neighboring. She closed her letter with an invitation to let ourselves discover the same sense of belonging in our own neighborhoods.
This, frankly, made me buck. Resistance is a bitch and I am her slave. But I’m not (always) too stubborn to ignore what’s good for me. Jamie’s challenge is one that I am still digesting but I wanted to share my raw reactions with you in case you or someone you know can relate. Maybe, just maybe, there’s something good for us to be learned from neighboring.
My response to Jamie:
Wow. This email has given me so much to chew on. As someone who’s moved almost constantly since I was eleven years old, averaging a move once a year since, much of this newsletter felt like reading a delightfully cozy chapter from a novel about a foreign land, where people have things like stability, community, and magical occurrences like potlucks and glow-in-the-dark Easter eggs.
I am keenly aware of how I deliberately avoid my neighbors. I will listen on the inside of my own door until I hear their voices fade down the elevator, just so I don’t have to share it with them and make eye contact, or exchange pleasantries that feel anything but pleasant. I am aware of how I pretend I’m not home when I hear a knock on my door—is it UPS? A wrong Postmates order? A neighbor, needing something from me?
I am aware of how badly I once wanted to make bonds and how, as a young teenager, I consciously trained myself to sever that need in order to avoid the pain of saying goodbye when God told my parents it was time to move again. And again and again.
I’m aware of how, as an actor for most of my adult life, my nomadic youth primed me for a nomadic adulthood where privacy is paramount. My thought processes, both founded and paranoid, went something like this: If I engage with my neighbor and they recognize me from a show, they’ll never stop harassing me about what so-and-so is really like on set and do I have any storyline spoilers to share? Also, if they manage to see me naked through a window, will they take my picture and sell it to the paparazzi?
I am aware of how much mistrust and emotional distance I now harbor toward anyone in my proximity—especially near my home, where I cannot escape if I need solitude and un-intrusiveness and CALM.
I’m aware of how sad I feel, wanting the mythic word called “community” and feeling like it’s never worth the drama and strife and goodbyes that inevitably come with it.
I’m aware that I’ve been telling myself, One day, one day I’ll be settled. One day, I’ll have neighbors whose music I won’t mind, whose kids won’t be hellions, who will give as much as they ask for. One day, I’ll want to ask for and give back, and I’ll be safe.
I’m aware that I want to cry now. It feels like grief and delusion, or the grief of a delusion. And now I want to laugh! How understandable this all is to me. How much compassion I have for myself. For people. Even as I keep them at a distance.
I’m aware that, since my last move, my partner and I have very deliberately decided not to “plug in.” This isn’t our forever home, we say, and what’s the point of making friends we’ll probably leave this fall or next spring? But we don’t know that for sure.
I’m aware that Dan, the former school teacher next-door whose work calls annoy me every Monday, is a sweetheart. Nosy—why does he need to know how long I’ll be out of town?—but a sweetheart. Darren and Sandra just moved in across the hall and remind me of the rich, aprés-ski parents of friends I once wished I had. Nameless neighbors on our community roof had a hot dog dinner I stumbled upon trying to give my leashed cat some Outside Time. They loved Boone, and I scurried behind the brick divider to avoid their curiosity because I was high AF.
But maybe the next time I hear them waiting for the elevator, I can make the brave step of sharing it with them. What’s the worst that can happen? Maybe the next time Boone and I are on the roof, I’ll let the kind lady with the bad highlights pet him.
I’m not sure I’ll ever be an active participant in what my friend Jamie calls neighboring. Although I dream of it, I cannot imagine what it must feel like to be settled, to be a long-term renter who happily renews their lease year after year, or to be a home-owner. It is simply too foreign a concept to me.
People make noise. Music. Construction. I have moved over all of these and then some, and I can only begin to imagine buying when I can purchase outright a plot with 50-plus acres.
“I’m tryna buy my neighbor house and turn it to a yard,” sings Tyler, the Creator in “Dogtooth.” Me, too, Tyler. Me, too. One day, I’ll be so rich that I won’t need the jobs of a big city anymore.
In the meantime, I just might work on redefining neighbor from meaning “a nuisance” to “a possible friend.” (My insides are screeching at me.) “An intrusion” to “a possible cat sitter.” (Yes, I feel guilty.) “A royal pain in my ass” to “a network of support and fun.” (I am aghast at my own conceivabilities.)
I can at least try sharing the elevator. I may or may not let you know how it goes.
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I couldn’t exactly relate to feeling around neighbours.
But I really related to this
“I’ve learned most people are at first charmed by the curious and then put off when it leads to truths that are less than comfortable.”
Thanks!
I struggle so much with this too, and I feel like I can track how working in the public eye, curating social media, and then finally experiencing the capstone of the social-isolation-pandemic nurtured me into this fearful, neighbor-avoidant version that is contrary to how I see my true nature. It’s so hard to recondition. Thanks for sharing and commiserating, as always.