cannot run

I was digging through some old journal entries looking for how I felt in a particular life event when I stumbled on something I could have written today:

“I think we all need a place to regroup. A place we have been before. I place we can return to. I think we need multiple places like that. I think the purpose of them is to help us get to the next place we are going.

Too much. Am I too much? I’m having a hard time figuring out what I am. I love people. Deeply. But I feel very anti social. I don’t always want to be around people. I don’t always want to go hang out with someone. I don’t know why that is. I can’t pin point the reason. I just know that that’s the thought process.”

From a private journal entry on July 13th, 2013

I battle my introversion. I deny it, push passed it, and eventually succumb to it. I turned my phone off yesterday and have batted away phone calls today, asking folks to text or audio message instead. When the default is extroversion and access, it’s hard to not feel shame in wanting to not speak. It was a relief to only have a brief conversation with a barista yesterday and a phone call with my girlfriend at night.

I’m a prolific communicator both at work and in my personal life. I keep in touch with people almost to a fault and have learned to ease back. The visibility of working in an open source project is exhausting in many subtle ways.

I’ve turned down four speaking opportunities in the last few weeks and each time felt like I was letting someone down (something I need to work on letting go of). The toll it takes is not worth it in those cases and I rarely feel I have something particularly meaningful or new to say. I don’t want to be noise.

As the return of in person events stabilizes, I have found that being wrecked by these events feels different and more painful. Before I was more okay with the price I paid and the need to sneak away for an hour here and there to go retreat into pure darkness in my hotel room in the middle of the day away from everyone else. My mom used to describe me as a wind up doll with a big need to recharge. I took my task of recharging seriously, optimized it as best as I could, and hid it as much as I could. Adding in nomading more intensely, I’d often zip from a week straight of 12-14 hours/day of socializing to hardly speaking to 1-2 people a day for more than 10 min for 2-3 weeks after. I’d empty myself out and slowly refill, without anyone being truly aware. I dealt.

I don’t want to do it anymore, even as I still have to do this from time to time. The break from needing to do that brought by the pandemic has made returning to this previously “normal” ask almost unbearable. I don’t like the price I pay with the rest of my life and the rest of my relationships. Already, I can feel the confusion and disappointment from others in declining dinners, extra hangouts, “quick coffee break”, etc. I can get the confusion. It can be a huge contrast to how well I am able to keep up in the written word from afar but that two hour dinner will take more from me than I can explain and I want that energy to go to other areas of my life, especially after 8+ hour days of needing to be on.

During the depths of the pandemic, I wondered how I would be changed and wanted to be. I did not want to walk out of the horrible experience to return to how I was. In this last year, I am realizing that this entire dynamic is a big part of how I am changing. A friend once told me that “not everyone deserves the full Anne experience” and she was right. I also simply cannot give it to everyone nor do I owe it to anyone. Being a young, queer, female presenting person makes that hard, especially in a very male dominated space for work. My time and energy does not always feel like mine. The standards I am held to to be friendly, to reach out to, etc do not feel balanced. I also am an introvert and feel incredibly lucky to have such a large life that there are other things I want to sink my time into at the end of a long conference day, like catching up with a friend of 10+ years or simply spending time in my own brain.

It feels awful to have to explain this to folks and yet I find myself in situation that almost demand I do. In turn, when I do show up and when I do chat with folks, I can only hope that they can feel my intense desire to be present, curious, and kind. I absolutely adore lifechatting and getting lost for hours in a conversation. I hope there can be a growing understanding that to do so both is incredibly meaningful to me and drains me. I am intentional in where my energy is going and even more so now. When I choose to show up, I am doing exactly that. It was not an afterthought or a whim.

Ah the gratitude I feel for those who write me, understand when I need to do an audio message over a call, who don’t push when I say “no”, and who continue to invite me even as I might have to decline. Ah the gratitude I feel to work remotely and to work with the written word so much.

I don’t know how long this intense period of introversion will last or whether this is how I have always been and the pandemic gave me a chance to see the toll anew. Either way, I cannot run from it and I struggle with the fallout.