The Comfort of Being a Pandemic Recluse

Living with social anxiety has always been difficult enough as it is. But life generally forces you to be social, and you get used to living in discomfort. Day to day existence is painful, but it’s also normal.

But when the state of the world suddenly gives you permission to almost completely withdraw from life, and that drags on for over a year, you quickly realize how much of your life you’ve spent doing and doing and doing and doing, interacting with people, socializing more than you ever fully wanted to. Not because you didn’t necessarily want to actually do most of those things in spite of simultaneously feeling like it was torture, but because you get used to having a lot of people asking for your time and you’re told to overfill your schedule, so you do. You get so used to living in a state of unyielding fear, and that it’s just how it is.

But the pandemic hits, and you take a step back, and for the very first time in your life you feel like you’re allowed to actually relax.

Like, really genuinely relax.

Initially, it just feels like sweet, sweet rest. Kind of akin to what it’s like when you’ve been running on adrenaline for such a long time that when you finally stop, you crash. You’re forced to actually spend time recovering by falling off the map and resting deeply. The kind of rest that later makes you feel refreshed, rejuvenated, even energized.

But then the pandemic drags on.

The newfound shortage of invites you get from various people, to various things, continues to feel like massive relief. You can do nothing and for once you don’t have to feel guilty. It’s amazing. Now there is all this space in your life for the suppressed you — the part of you that doesn’t want to do all the things; the part of you that has been constantly forcing, forcing, forcing, pushing uphill with all its might. It comes with a sense of freedom.

You realize that, while it was incredibly empowering to reach a point in your life where you could make yourself do things and you were in a better place than you ever had been before, another part of you actually still kind of hated it.

And as the pandemic slogs on and normal people want to get back to their old social lives, the invites start coming back in. They still keep wanting your time, your energy, your interaction. They ask you to join them for virtual meetups and games and classes and movie nights. Except now you’ve had a taste of what it’s like to stop letting everyone in. To stop saying yes to things that of course, part of you still wants to do. But the other part of you that has always wanted to say no no no no FINALLY now gets its way, and it feels like such sweet relief. You find yourself in a place where no is the only thing you ever want to say anymore. The idea of forcing yourself to go back to the level of stress you lived your whole life in feels so utterly overwhelming that you feel like you can no longer handle it. You don’t even want to respond, because for the first time in your life, you’re not living in an almost constant state of fight-or-flight. On the contrary, you’ve gotten spoiled by this state of relaxation.

On top of that, it’s also the first time in your life that you’ve been in a relationship with someone that completely understands, and doesn’t constantly berate you for struggling with social interactions, pushing you to do things you don’t want to do. You’re with someone that you feel completely comfortable with and feels completely comfortable with you. Someone that is so easy to be around that it doesn’t feel like a social interaction at all, it just feels like comfort. Like home.

Even to all of the close friends and family that you love, that you do actually want to spend time with. They reach out. But that part of you, that you had to have a death grip on your whole life, just so you could function? It suddenly now has a death grip on you.

Interacting with others is harder than it ever has been, purely because you no longer have the momentum of forcing yourself to say yes all the time. Not only that, it’s become socially acceptable. Instead of life and society punishing you for hiding out, it’s now the default way of being.

And so saying yes feels like the most exhausting, stressful, gut-wrenching thing — even when it’s something that many other parts of you want to do. When you do say yes to something, it’s a week in advance, and it sounds good at the time. But when the day finally arrives, you feel overwhelmed and no longer want to participate. Interaction feels way too hard. The amount of effort it would take to get the social train moving again just feels impossible.

So you start to say no to everyone. You stop talking to people. You withdraw from the world and relish in the comfort of being able to finally crawl into a blanket and curl up in the corner and stay in a state of relaxation, relief. To get to choose to push the pain of anxiety away, something you’ve never had the luxury of doing before now except in brief bursts.

And it’s this weird, frustrating, exhausting dichotomy of absolute relief and a simultaneous struggle as you feel the relationships with people that you care about slowly sliding further and further away. But you don’t want to admit it or talk about it because if you do, then you know people will reach out and you’ll have to respond. No matter how much you want to say yes, you still just want to say no.

You feel sad and worried that people that you like and love and care about will think that you don’t care about them anymore. That they don’t matter to you. The social anxiety creates a story about how they judge you for withdrawing. And you know you could set the story straight, but that would require interacting, so you don’t.

And honestly? You can’t decide if this is the first time in your life you feel mentally and emotionally healthy, or if this is just the first time you’ve completely allowed yourself to be broken and okay with it, without still trying to do what society tells you that you are supposed to do.

Maybe both.