Space Please

Introversion or self-protection?

I’ve been doing a podcast tour to promote my book. Recently, in preparation for an upcoming episode, I spoke with a woman who coaches introverts. We weren’t recording, we were just talking to see if my book content would be a fit for her audience.

She asked if I think of myself as an introvert, which I do. I’ve written about it before. Then she discussed attributes which she finds across most of the introverts with whom she works. But I didn’t recognize myself in many of the traits she associates with introversion. She’s the expert, not me, but it got me thinking about my experience as an introvert.

Am I an introvert outlier? Or did I just grow up in a time before social media, when we were less inclined to be greedy for labels? Or was there some aspect of self-preservation in being alone?

I was born in 1962, so I grew up in the 70s. In my world, as a little white girl, there were pretty clear guidelines about what I could do and how I had to be. I needed to be polite, smile, engage adults in conversation. No talking back, not even when leering old men made suggestive comments about my “boyfriends” when I was still in elementary school.

My mother was immature and intrusive, taking up all of the emotional air in any room, and she was prone to terrible outbursts of anger. I apologized profusely and often, almost like a stutter, to try to head off any unintentional infraction.

No where in this complex of overlapping personal and social expectations was there any option to choose my own way of interacting with the world. Like many children, I was at the mercy of the environments my parents constructed. My mother was a heavy smoker my whole life. Even if she was unaware of the risks of secondhand smoking, the fact that both of her children had wet, barking coughs all winter every winter should have been a clue to the impact of her habit.

My mother was afraid of flying so when went to visit her family in Washington State, we drove, from the East Coast, in a Ford Country Squire station wagon with my parents, my sister, the dog and cat. My mother chain smoked Benson and Hedges Menthols as she drove, pouring coffee from a thermos with a red plaid pattern on the outside, for 10-12 hours a day.

Then at night when we got into the motel room, my sister and I in one bed, my mother would get on the phone to her sister and complain about the mother she was driving across the country at a manic pace to visit. She was loud, and the smoke from her cigarette rose up like the biblical pillar through the large cylindrical lamp shade that glowed between the two beds. In that memory, my father isn’t in the room, and I imagine him taking full advantage of the adult privilege of being able to flee to take a walk to get something from the store.

Whenever I could be alone I would take advantage of the opportunity. When I couldn’t be physically alone I would escape into a book. To this day I can get so immersed in reading I don’t notice if someone is speaking to me.

When we moved into a bigger house and I had my own room, I would pack a lunch and stay there for the weekend. My mother and I called it my “hibernation” as if it was a joke, but she didn’t seem to be curious about why I would prefer to avoid my entire family for days at a time where I could.

I do believe if we are choosing a binary between introversion and extroversion, I am an introvert. But I wonder how much of my deep desire for solitude is innate and how much of it is a flight from dysfunctional and destructive people with more power than me?

My grandchildren have a phrase I love: “Space, please.” They say this to adults who are in their space, physically or psychically. Or, as in a note I received this weekend “give me spase.”

And they get it.

In many places, there is no giving of space, the notion of being able to request space and have that request respected where possible is unfamiliar. I didn’t get it at home or out in the world. My body, my expressions, my attractiveness or lack thereof was constantly policed by the people around me, men and women.

People always commented on my body, even as a young child, without a moment’s hesitation. My sister and I got very tan in the summer, and people would tell us, “you are brown as a berry!” multiple times in one trip to the grocery store. My sister and I would be picking out Jello flavors, and some old white lady would lean over and say, “you are brown as berries” and then two aisles over when we’re getting dishwasher soap for my mom a different white lady would say the same thing.

Were they wondering about our race, in the small rural town where my grandparents had a beach cabin? My hair was very short then and I was often asked if I was a boy or a girl. Why was is necessary for these strangers in the market to know my gender or race? From the time I can remember until I hit 50 and became socially invisible, I was always subject to intense scrutiny and commentary for being a female in a public space.

It made me hypervigilant, the experience of my body and demeanor being constantly judged in the world. Living with an emotionally volatile mother also made me hypervigilant.

I remember being a kid and reading a Superman comic book about Superman’s super-hearing and how horrible it was when he couldn’t turn it off. I was standing in my grandparent’s beach cabin on a summer day, the red gingham curtains on the windows, feeling an uncanny sense of recognition. I couldn’t – can’t- turn off my awareness of the emotions, risk and reactions of the people around me.

Which is exhausting. I still remember the black and white drawing of Superman, his back arched in agony, his hands clapped over his ears, the torture of hearing too much.

Being alone, then, is more than just a way to recharge. It is also protection. From the barrage of expectations and demands, the need to scan for danger and defend against attack. Superman, by the end of the comic, had restored whatever filter he needed to allow him to selectively tune into the super-hearing rather than be overwhelmed.

Solitude was my only filter unless I was with my own children in my own house, which felt safe and happy. There is, of course a vigilance on the part of parents and grandparents, checking to make sure everyone is safe and fed and getting along, but the emotional vigilance is different. Can I do anything else to make these beloved children safe and comfortable is a very different question than how can I protect myself from the inevitable depredations of this unsafe person or space.

Which explains why I spend as much time as I can now in the summer with my small grandchildren, outside on the lawn that is strewn with a constellation of buttercups.

During the pandemic, working from home, living by myself, I would spend entire days in silence. It was a stressful time, of course, but I remember thinking of those days as my monk life, a season where I was immersed in deep solitude. I think that still, the days like today when I am alone and don’t speak to another person until a get a phone call late in the afternoon. The solitude, the monk life, can be deeply restorative, if only as a time for my nervous system to recalibrate to my own rhythms, my own pace, rather than being in dialog with another’s energy or demand.

But I wish I had experienced more spaces where I could be with another person and still safe, drop the hypervigilance and just enjoy the buttercups in the grass the way I do now, with a small child at my side, looking up at the thin cirrus clouds against the light blue of the summer sky.