Tell us what's happened to you recently (that's interesting)

I don’t know what I am, but if I sit with a group of 5 or 6 at a table just for conversation, it wears me out. I like one-on-one conversation. That can energize me.

I’m more agoraphobic than just anxious. I have Buspirone and Paxil for that. And at times, in party situations, alcohol. Although I learned the hard way that Buspar and alcohol is not a good combo if you like to remember the fun you had. :)

I only quote unquote read that. I downloaded and listened to it while running, and even I grew tired of it. But…that might have been the miles.

Being an introvert who has to be an extrovert is weird. I always felt guilty about it because I thought actors had to be extroverts. I can be both, but I’m more like a dog. I’m comfortable in my den, with my pack. Once I establish trust with somebody, I’m better.

Is it scary for her when you have folks over for meals?

I love cooking for people, but it helps that I have tasks to focus upon. Manning the grill while folks are milling about is good. And board gaming is similar. We have stuff to focus upon. And then small talk develops about movies, because they know I’m into that, and things tend to glide. It’s just the barrier for entry that hinders me, I think. I’m trying to get over that right now.

Dang that’s a good way to put it. I love engaging people in conversation, but afterwards I’m just tanked. I feel like I’ve just run a meeting, and then I still need to clean up the kitchen and they all get to leave.

-xtien

BINGO! I am in no way an actor. But sometimes I feel like one. Going to a party at the wife’s request but not being interested. Get there. Try to mingle. Oh, beer, cool. I end up being a great conversationalist. Then at some point the wife pulls me aside. Ease up on that stuff.

I can’t win. :)

I suspect most of us here resemble this remark. I’m usually good for 1-2 hours of socialization when forced into it. Then I run into a wall and need to go hide. Beer can extend that a bit, or hanging with people that are awesome like-minded nerds. But the most I think I’ve ever gotten is 5-6 hours before it’s time to go curl up in a corner somewhere.

Utterly terrifying.

My gf has a rather severe expression and seizes up around people she’s uncomfortable with. There was an unpleasant time in college, her freshman year, when her mental illnesses really came to the fore and took her out in a very bad way, that a lot of our old high school friends who’d gone to the same college as her basically decided she sucked and said a lot of very nasty things about her behind her back, which eventually made their way back to her. It was extremely painful.

So now she has a crippling fear of my friends not liking her. So her anxiety seizes her up, and her face defaults to its usual severe-and-somewhat-disinterested expression. And then some small element of the social interaction will inevitably kick the anxiety into higher gear, because most of my friends are nerds who sometimes do or say “awkward” things, and her hyper-empathy makes her freak out on their behalf, because if she’d done anything awkward, of course everyone would have noticed it and been mean to her forever about it. . .

. . . it often becomes an unending cycle she can’t escape from, basically perpetuating the very image she is so afraid to showcase to people.

So she mostly just avoids my social gatherings like the plague. It doesn’t help that our interests don’t overlap much, so if I did have friends over for boardgames or RPGs or hangs, she wouldn’t have much in common with any of them, and she does take a pretty dim view of most nerdy pursuits, so it’s hard for her to even feign interest in them.

So I rarely hold things here. Three times, actually, since we moved to Raleigh ~8 years ago, and one of those was just hosting a couple we knew from back home who were here for a Con. I pretty much do all of my socializing outside of the apartment, which has the unfortunate downside of taking me away from the missus a lot. And obviously, as a party-loving extrovert crazy person, I desperately wish I could host folks much, much more often than I have been able to.

She’s come out to a couple of parties with me, including my birthday parties. It’s very obviously everything she can do to put on a good show of being there for me; she usually hibernates for ages afterward, just completely wiped out by the strain of needing to put on that mask for so long. I feel pretty guilty about that, so I’ve also started to shy away from inviting her out to things with all but a tiny handful of the people I know that she’s come to know well enough to be comfortable around (at which point she can be lively, vivacious, hilarious, charming, gloriously crude, and deeply invested–there are quite a few reasons why we’re still together after 15+ years, after all!). I just wish there were some way to short-circuit the process so that circle of “safe people” could expand :(

Would it be going to far to ask what meds, if any, that she takes?

She’s on a high dose of extended-release Wellbutrin, which levels out the Bipolar Type II enough that she can get out of bed and stay conscious for a full day of work without depression just shutting her down completely like it used to, and she really hasn’t had a serious manic episode in a couple of years thanks to that.

But the concomitant ADHD and anxiety are more or less untreated; her work schedule is very intense, and her current mental health office doesn’t offer late or weekend appointments, so she always manages to convince herself it’s not okay to go to appointments at all. She knows she needs at least one other drug in the mix, and probably some pretty hardcore therapy, but I suspect most of you who have struggled with these things know that the gap between “knowing I need help” and “taking active steps to get said help, or even letting someone else take them for me” is pretty enormous.

Yeah. It’s a damn crapshoot. 90% of the time therapists, psychiatrists and the like are shooting pills in the dark. Maybe something will help. The best guy I went to in NYC was a psychopharmacologist. He knew drugs better than a simple psychiatrist, and he was very careful to prescribe due to that. Might want to look into it.

I was going to reply to these above, but that post got big and has a pretty clear thesis statement already, so I’ll risk double-posting to remark just how much all of these posts remind me of most of my closest friends here in Raleigh (and, obviously, as described at length, my partner as well), yet how utterly incomprehensible the sentiments they reflect feel to me on a core level.

Other people are the fuel that allows me to do anything at all, it feels like. Conversations–be they one-on-one with a close and trusted friend over a meal or a walk, or shouted over pounding music and shenanigans at a bustling party–are my ultimate drug, and the sheer experience of being surrounded by others, sharing experiences and moments and memories with them, feeling their emotional reactions to those things, experiencing the give and take of talking to one another, learning about them, showing them sides of myself, doing favors for them, begrudgingly accepting help in return, going on adventures and roadtrips and concerts and more. . .

. . . usually, when I come home after a major outing (or series of outings, if I’ve stacked my day particularly well) is almost always accompanied by a sense of loss as the atmosphere I’ve been vibing on for so many hours is suddenly pulled away, replaced by echoing quiet and solitude (since, in all likelihood, my partner’s passed out in bed after yet another all-nighter for work).

Chatting online helps, and I’ve got half a dozen or more individual and group chats, plus Discord and Slack and MightyText, all running at all times, but it just can’t truly compare to the experience of other people right there with you. Goddamn.

Of course, since almost everyone I know is an introvert, those moments of quietude are a must, lest I run them all off forevermore ;-)

You sound like rock musicians that I have talked to. They live for the live shows. That energy that the audience gives them. I think the song by Bob Seger covers it.

Yeah extroverts draw energy from crowds. Introverts tend to energize alone. It’s not hugely a like or dislike crown things although there maybe underlying issues in addition to that sort of thing.

I don’t mind crowds at all, can go from sun up to well past sun down in theme parks, and a week long vacation like all alone would sadden me but I need hours or a day of just… down time in between crowds, family gatherings and events.

This is very well put, Randy. I think my problem is the barrier for entry. I love having people over. I love entertaining people. I do not like the idea of throwing parties. And yet, when folks come over and we throw a party, I can thrive. It’s exciting to meet people in the moment and figure out what makes them tick. What moves them. I love that. But it is exhausting as well.

It’s a hard balance to maintain. Because I do hang out with people who can be a little taciturn, and I feel like I need to draw them out. I feel like that’s my job at the table. And it often pays off. But it’s also taxing.

So when I have a good evening with folks, especially when I’ve cooked, I feel great. Fueled as you say. But also…I dunno…out of breath.

-xtien

There’s a state of being here in Seattle, folks who move here from elsewhere call it “the Seattle freeze.” You’ll meet someone, exchange pleasantries, maybe hit it off and make plans to meet up sometime in the future. Hey, you might think, I’ve made a friend! We’ll go do fun stuff together! And then - they never call you, and politely put you off when you try to nail them down. Are they avoiding you? Secretly judging you? Performing a weird social experiment?

It can be tough for recent transplants here, not knowing anyone and running into The Freeze. But me, I fucking love the Seattle Freeze. I meet people, they’re nice, we talk a bit and then we move on. Maybe I’ll see them again and maybe I won’t. Either way is good! I don’t need a commitment.

So that’s the kind of guy I am, not really an introvert or an extrovert as best I can tell. I like people, but I like them best in small doses.

The Long Walk

It’s his best book, and he wrote it as Richard Bachman so I think the style ends up a bit different and might work better for you.

Me too, man. Though I will say its slowed as I’ve gotten older. I’ve noticed I need to recharge more between events. I’m still feeding on the social interaction in friend events, but afterward I just want a bit of time to absorb and reset.

Yeah. I wasn’t trying to ignore the previous message about stretching myself too thin; just got so caught up n things I forgot to reply!

What I’m finding is that my worsening physical health is beginning to seriously impede my planned social life and work schedule. Going out and having fun might leave me so sore and wiped out that I need to go in late the next day, my stupid gastro issues can cut fun events short, and my sleep apnea can turn me into a zombie when I’m trying to be fun for people.

Gotta leave enough time to improve myself if I wanna have anything left for others.

Armando, I know you aren’t 40 yet, but welcome to 40+ life. From the time you’re at now, sadly, there will never be a time in your life from this point forward that you bounce back as fast or seem 100% recovered from whatever you did, even a day prior. Don’t get me wrong you’ll have recharge days and days you feel great, but for the most part, you hold those days up higher as, “awesome,” from 35 on.

Man I sound like an old man.

So I’m sitting in my office playing Shiren (I am really, really enjoying it!) and I hear some dripping.

Alarmed, I look around and see the window in my room, which is very high up and should never have any water coming out of it (it’s not even an egress window) is dripping water. I stuffed a few towels into it and ran out to scoop what I assumed was a bunch of snow stuck in the window sill, which is odd because we don’t have much snow up against the house, but hey you never know.

I come out side and what I saw made me dash over to my neighbor’s house to confront him immediately.

This guy had dug a trench away form his back porch and just stopped digging when he got far enough away… but of course, that just funneled all the water from his back yard directly to my fucking window! I got him out and showed this to him and he did apologize and said he didn’t think it through that far, he was only going out as far as he could until he had to get back to work. I do believe him, and he did offer to dig it away from the window but he had to wait until his wife got home from work because he was watching their baby. I told him that would be great, and that I’d start digging and he could come and help me when he could. So I started digging…

…and digging…

Until I finally broke out to the street.

I’m going to tell you, watching all the water roll out of the path I made into the street was honestly super, super satisfying. And yes, I’m not amazing at digging or I’d have made a straight line from the window to the road, instead of half way looking up and realizing I was digging a path that would lead right through our street pole and the power junction. Oops. I had to do a little course correction.

So I scooped and cleared it all out and got it done and was satisfied with it after about 20 minutes of hard labor. For those that have never had to do it, shoveling wet snow/slush is not fantastic. I told the guy he was off the hook for digging it any more, but that he needed to … like never do that again, which he agreed to. I’m keeping these pictures up on my OneDrive in a special folder because if it happens again, and it brings water into my office and damages anything, I’m going to take probably have to persue some sort of civil case against him. I really hope it never comes to that. I didn’t spell that out to him, I kept it light and friendly but tried to make he understood I was not pleased and I told him straight up we would have had a big problem if I hadn’t have been home to catch this as it started to happen, which he seemed to understand. Some of the guys at work know him and were surprised he would do this, so I do think it was just thoughtless on his part, and not malicious. I’d like to believe he wasn’t just randomly trying to pour water into my basement, at least.

So that was my afternoon last night.

Holy melt, batman. What temp did you guys hit there? That’s a lot of runoff water.