A Chatty Introvert’s Re-entry Into Normal Life — Post Pandemic

Literally, my mask won’t leave my face when I am in public. I am far past that stage where I was so conscious of how it looked on me.

I guess that in my mind, the benefits of wearing it outweighed these petty concerns.

I’m sure you’re thinking that I am one of those people that wore or still wears masks for health reasons.

Perhaps I want to protect my immunity? Maybe I don’t want to spread the virus? Aww. That’d be considerate. But no. None of that is the main reason.

I struggle with human relationships.

Sometimes I only have to wonder how people in my life manage to keep up with me. I can’t even keep up with the relationship I have with myself!!

So this mask thing,... This is just an excuse to publicly exist as a recluse.

Also, the mask mandates and the virus appeared just in time when I needed to hide in public.

The pandemic and first lockdown happened 3 months after I had left India. I loved Vellore because I could exist in my assumed invisible bubble.

People in Vellore kept much to themselves, friends and families.

The friendships were also pretty tight. They reminded me of the year 2000 when I was 6 and friend groups had literal lists written in pencil.

These were constantly updated based on several factors such as sharing or not sharing grab on visitation days.

It was only the Alpha,(group leader), and his best friend that were written in thick blue ink.

I hated friend lists.

At 6 traversed several lists to know that I would never be in friendships whose value was solely based on the opportunities I brought to the group.

So when I got to India and I noticed this similar pattern of friendships, although it had no lists or constant shuffles, what I saw was enough to keep me away from the whole close friendship thing.

People were reluctant to know me past the trivial things such as my name and native.

I think I was reluctant to know them too. I made no effort. I lie. I ran away from the effort.

Many of them used to gossip about me in my presence just as they did to anyone who didn’t speak the same language as them.

They thought I didn’t understand Tamil or Hindi and I never wanted to blow my cover either.

But you will be surprised at how much of a language you can pick up in 5+ years of immersed living without trying.

As to why people were reluctant to know me past the trivial stuff, I guess it could have also been my reluctance to engage in human interactions.

Depression had me gripped in its teeth. I was hurting but I was also too ashamed to talk about it.

Over years, this became my way of life. I kept much to myself and tried as hard as possible to stay away from people.

So when I left India, I knew that this public anonymity bubble had popped.

I was returning to a country where everyone looked like me, spoke like me, and some people knew me.

I began by refusing to change my WhatsApp number.

Then I finessed my dad into helping me get a local line under his name. To this day, I have given it out to less than 5 people — 2 family members, 3 friends.

These were measures I thought would keep me anonymous still. Then masks happened.

I am not going to talk about the social lockdowns because this was pretty much my reality long before the pandemic started.

I figured that with my mask on, people who knew me would require a lot more concentration to figure out that it was me.

It worked. Or at least, I pretended that it worked.

For those months, I walked the streets of Kampala and passed by many former classmates, friends, relatives without them recognizing me.

Some who did also ignored me just the same.

The truth is I don’t remember what life was like when I was 19.

Those days when the police on the streets of Kampala knew me for driving around the city at reckless speeds without a permit as if daring them for a police chase.

Those days when at 17 years old, my friends and I would take cars either rented or from my friend’s dad, make a convoy with hazards on then drive like maniacs to attend some school functions.

I have always been introverted but I had my wild side that I could deploy on command. The side I don’t remember.

Ten years ago, I knew how to phase between these identities which made for a healthy lifestyle for me since I was never polarised to any of the extremes.

In it, I could go onto the basketball court and dominate as a center-back. I’d like to think I did it so well because I got several MVP awards for it.

Can you believe I was once a prefect? My 18-year-old self was a school prefect? for real?

Can you believe I was once in charge of a full school club? The guitar club? A position I held from 15- 17 years old?

And while I was there, can you believe I managed to teach people how to play guitars and one of them currently has a career in it?

During my teens and early 20s, making friends was much easy for me.

Now I realize that much of my confidence was strongly anchored to my social skills. For some people, it was their smarts, talents, or something else.

For me, it was social skills.

Being social was great although, with it, the nature of my friendships was not that deep. I am not complaining about that of course.

I am only mentioning this to follow up with the fact that I was blind to this reality. Therefore my expectations were high when they shouldn’t have been.

Therefore, when the depression hit, I couldn’t stop the fall fast enough.

Misery is strange.

First, you hate it. Then as time passes you learn to tolerate it. Enough time passes and it becomes so that you depend on it. I must have heard this phrase somewhere but I find it to be true.

For a couple of years now, I have stopped feeling the pain from the depression I had those many years ago.

In fact, I can talk about anything concerning that time without having the slightest trigger of sadness.

Memories of my depression are just as beautiful as that time my crush had my back when I bunked class and she signed my name on the attendance sheet.

I am saying that they make me smile.

But when it comes to my depression, I smile not because I healed. I dwelt in that misery for so long that I learned how to depend on it.

It now shows in simple things like my resistance to letting go of my mask.

I wear my mask religiously not because I am avoiding health scares but because I have social anxiety.

I am afraid of getting closely attached to people. I have tried to pretend that it isn’t true but facts don’t lie.

The challenge with involuntary dependence on misery is that letting it go is not an issue of time. It is not like emotional pain that fades with time.

Involuntary dependence on misery becomes stronger with time. The more you let it happen, the more it becomes your way of life.

For me, the more I care about people, the more anxious I become when talking to them. I try my best to hide it though.

In fact, the people I ghost the most are those I care about the most.

But I am able to recognize this as a defect because it wasn’t the way I always was.

But now, this dependence on misery seems to have distorted my way of navigating relationships with people.

Social media gives me anxiety so I have to keep deactivating it for a couple of weeks or months at a time. This is something that I never used to think about.

I know people talk about how freeing a non-social media life is but to me, it is misery. The misery that I have to depend on.

Anything that deprives me of contact with my friends in hopes of being happy is misery. This false perception of peace that I have when I do these things is terrible.

I find comfort in being a “public recluse” with my mask on but I hate that I can’t step away from that.

I long to break this habit but at the moment, it’s nothing but an attempt to outswim an orca.