Isolation

Image credit: Photo by H@Ru on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

I feel very comfortable in written words, in the virtual world, but relating to people face-to-face has always been more difficult for me. I'm an introvert (meaning that time around people drains me, even when I enjoy it) and although no longer noticeably shy, I still have some underlying social anxiety. Social situations, even when I seem at east, can be riddled with fear, nervousness and stress.

Shortly after my son was born, I quit my full-time job, and hid away from the world, depressed and overwhelmed. My son was colicky and high needs, I was suffering from (in retrospect) undiagnosed post-partum depression, and my husband's addiction (although I didn't know that's what it was at the time) was exploding with the stress. Although the depression has lifted, although I've worked on myself and my recovery, although I've reached out to others online and made some fabulous real life friends, as a stay-at-home mom, I still have the luxury of not having to talk to anyone other than my family all day; I'm alone for the hours my kids are in school and there are no coworkers popping by to pull me out of my comfortable solitude. I very much like it that way, although sometimes I like it in the same way that I like snarfing down a pint of Ben & Jerry's. It's not always good for me.

Now after eight years at home (often alone) each day, I've slowly started coming back out into the world of real human voices and faces. I've started going back to real life 12 Step meetings. I've started going to weekly meditation sessions. (Yep, sitting in silence with my back turned to someone else sitting in silence. Now that's my idea of an ideal social gathering!) And I've started making phone calls here and there.

It reminds me of when I was a child and got chicken pox, just as winter was fading into spring. I got out of bed one morning and saw a small clear blister on my wrist. I picked at it (leaving a scar that remains to this day), then I noticed another and went to show my mother, who held a palm to my burning forehead and diagnosed me on the spot with chicken pox. I spent a few weeks (I think) miserable and feverish in bed, until the illness passed and it was time for me to go back to school. When that first blister had appeared, the trees were bare, dark and skeletal. But when I emerged again, healed, I walked outside and looked down the street. What had been stark and barren weeks before had been transformed, and I gasped to see that the world had turned a soft new green. Spring seemed to have arrived overnight.

When I had chicken pox, I was closed off from the world for weeks, and the world changed without me knowing it. With my son's birth, I fell into a kind of solitude that lasted for years, and as I slowly emerge into the world again now, I find I have changed without fully knowing it. The social situations I used to fear feel more comfortable now than ever before, and I'm finding those bare branches of mine are startlingly green.

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This post was originally published at The Second Road.