Misanthropic
I thought I was writing about Earth’s population reaching 8 billion, but it appears to be a shakedown of my subconscious.
On a perfectly sunny autumn day (it remains insane to me that mid-November is autumn in the Lower 48) I was carrying some cookie dough and a tub of yogurt back from the grocery store. A couple walked their dog straight toward me, blocks away, shoulder to shoulder in the sidewalk. Traffic let up. Without thinking, I crossed the street.
There’s a chance I might be misanthropic. Specifically, I feel taxed by superficial interactions with strangers. Awkwardness is the state of not-knowing where you stand, and a new interaction, even nodding a hat to a stranger, produces just enough variables to form a puzzle. And no one knows where they stand when someone is treating them like a puzzle.
Of course, the second puzzle in these interactions is myself: what do I want, is this discomfort impatience or intuition, am I truly not attracted to this person or am I lying to myself (more of an issue when I was younger and single). Between context and conversationalists, passing manners involves too many considerations, and I would like to consider cracking open this cookie dough.
It’s fine. The puzzles in a simple hello are just minutiae. Inevitably I will feel natural tipping my hat or nodding or, in true Portland style, examining a decaying tomato plant until threat of eye contact has passed. I just have to acknowledge that the puzzle exists. The social rubik's cube twists in a back corner of my mind, while I continue unruffled as a mature adult.
Social paralysis, then, is when 1% of your brain is idling on that rubik's cube and the guy at the checkout counter says something like “how do you get biceps like that?” and you consider:
a) it’s just a tight t-shirt
b) I operate a chainsaw for a living
c) wait he probably doesn’t need an actual answer what does this situation require
and you realize you need a response immediately and instead of 95% of your mental energy happily ignoring how much of the grocery budget you just put on your credit card, all that attention flees the present moment and joins the 1% of your brain spinning that social rubik's cube. Trouble is, adding attention to a metaphorical mental social rubik's cube doesn’t just make it spin faster, it can also multiply the number of squares in the cube, or jam things up so it doesn’t spin at all. You say “Ahhhmmmmmm.” Then you’ve insulted someone with your uncomfortable stammer, and I wasn’t put on this Earth to make people feel worse.
Most of the time, it’s fine. I’ve just been thinking about my relationship to social situations lately, wondering if I maladapted in high school. Maybe I too often hold my peace. Maybe I too often embarrass myself when I speak. Maybe I still don’t truly approach people with the generosity that grows from self-respect.
I wonder if hating the complexity of social dynamics is why I prefer jobs like fighting fire, where job performance isn’t about shaping the right email, but about tangible, hard tasks that people can see. No one’s impression of you matters if you can do the work, and no matter how weird you are, people will respect you if you’re good at your job.
It’s fine. I’m just examining my habits today—a systems check. Better to overdo social paranoia than neglect it. Sometimes I forget to idle a fraction of my attention on the puzzle of social context, and then I’m rambling about my job to Nathan at the coffee shop, forgetting the age old maxim:
Don’t tell your friends about your indigestion.
“How are you” is a greeting, not a question.
I can feel its onset, this over-loquaciousness, like an arthritic feels a cold front. It happens after a few days alone in the woods, or if I taste a little too much pride, or if I’m too distracted by my problems to dodge polite questions.
The worst response to that chatty weather system is to sip whiskey. Then my reduced units of attention are just enough to circle a conversational cul-de-sac, somehow compounding caveats and parentheticals until I’m inexplicably describing my new girlfriend’s butt to my friend Mari, not even listening to myself because I’m drunkenly using the force of my remaining willpower not to ask about my ex.
I can’t get too comfortable. It’s not safe to fully relax because not everyone appreciates an unspooled version of me flashing through their day. Which is why we need friends. They’re the people who we entrust with our weirdness, our foibles. We love them in turn for their strangeness and their flaws. We wander with them around parenthetical cul-de-sacs and know the conversation will end up right at home.
Seeing friends and family can feel like stretching out, like a first drink, like gently palming that little context puzzle but letting it be. With the right people you know, pretty exactly, where you stand.
Don't be afraid to keep 'unspooling' yourself for your readers here :)