On My Social Battery
Like many things in life, this revolves around a paradox of sorts. I want to be more social, but I have a limited capacity for it. Oddly enough, this is something that has only become apparent recently, as I had really never socialised enough to come close to that boundary. I find that relationship interesting. My lack of sociability is chief among a plethora of self-diagnosed character faults, and now I’ve found out that there’s something in me that wants to hinder my progress towards resolving it. That, or it’s a natural instinct to prevent an overcorrection – unlikely, but possible, I think.
The battery metaphor only extends so far. I don’t, unfortunately, get a helpful percentage representation that counts down to zero, it is sudden, but it’s just as stealthy. I never know until it’s already happened. What I notice in myself is that it manifests as two equally bad developments in a social setting. Those are the decline in contribution, and decline in quality of response. Instead of talking and adding to the conversation, even when I might have something interesting to add, I recede into my own mind, and communication becomes the last thing I want to do.
That second change, in how my response patterns deteriorate, is worse, I think. What might have before seemed like casual disinterest comes across as the far less forgivable active and intentional uninterest. As much as I, in those moments, would like to be on my own without any social responsibilities, I never want to make my friends feel bad, or make them think less of me for not engaging with them. Essentially, I don’t want to appear rude, especially not because of an unintentional mental state. It is, though, hard for anyone to judge intent. If I don’t answer a question, or laugh at a joke, or make eye-contact, there are many reasonable and negative interpretations of that behaviour.
I find that very scary. The way out of that fear, I think, is to make my feelings known. If I plainly tell the people around me that my social battery is running on fumes, then that eliminates the possibility of that dreaded misinterpretation. There is something slightly scary about communicating that fact to me, though. I think my inner hypochondriac is blowing this out of proportion, but it has equally convinced me that there is a possibility that my friends won’t accept that fact, or that they’ll hold a grudge either way. This next statement is true for so many more reasons than apply here: sometimes I need to just think less.
There is another possible layer to this whole situation, that I’m really hoping turns out to be true. Maybe this isn’t a hard boundary that’s impeding my progress in my quest to be more sociable. Maybe it’s an exercise – in which case, if I start treating the act of socialising as a muscle I can strengthen and train, that progress I’ve long been seeking is more attainable than I’d previously thought. I hope I don’t have the same relationship to it as I do to actual exercise, which has rarely been a particularly good one, but just knowing (or hypothesising) there is a way forward is extremely encouraging.