Out of My Depth

Imagine this. For the sake of argument, you are not a very strong swimmer. But you do like to be in the water, so you get yourself an ENORMOUS flutter board and you take it out to the lake or the pool and you flutter your way out of the shallows. Then you stand on your enormous flutter board. And it’s a bit of a struggle, as anyone who has tried to stand on a flutter board will tell you, but eventually you get yourself balanced. You’re feeling pretty stable. You’re in the water, like all the other adults, but you’ve got something helping you feel like the water is maybe more like the shallows. Someone swims by to say hi, and they, because it seems like the natural thing to do, step onto your flutter board. The flutter board sinks a little. You’re okay, you’re okay. Your shoulders are in the water now but you’re okay.

So the person says hi, then kicks off to join their other friends over there. The flutter board shakes but you regain your balance and take a deep breath. Then someone else comes by. They do the same thing. But this time, before you’ve regained your balance, two other people come over and hop onto the flutter board. Your chin dips into the water and then WHOOSH! The flutter board shoots out from under you all. Your head bobs quickly in and out of the water. They’re laughing, so you laugh too. But you’re also panicking, because you are, as aforementioned, not a very strong swimmer. You try not to cry because you don’t know how the others will react, and you dog-paddle through the water trying to reach your flutter board. But it’s so far and you’re not making much progress towards it.

“Don’t be silly!” the others say. “Let it go. You don’t need that.” Because, obviously, you wouldn’t be in the deep water in the first place if you actually couldn’t swim, right? But you do need the flutter board. Without it, you’re out of your depth.

Now imagine that this is actually metaph–okay, it’s obviously actually metaphorical.

In case it’s not obvious, this is about me, dealing with social interactions. I can recover from the occasional small dose of talking to someone. But the more people there are, the faster the interactions follow one after the other, the more out of my depth I feel. I’m left struggling. Badly. I go over and over the things I’ve said, or not said, and I try to prepare for the next encounter. The waters of social interaction, for me, are dark and scary. I don’t seem to float very naturally in them.

In cases where I’m comfortable with the person,¹ more frequent interactions keep the instability of my footing to a minimum because I have the opportunity to correct myself and check whether I’ve been misunderstood. Longer gaps just give me the opportunity to question whether I’m really sure of how they will react to me. If I’m not comfortable with someone, though, there is no particular benefit to interacting more frequently because I will always feel off-balance.

I thoroughly reject the labels “introvert” and “extrovert.” I think the rules that govern our need for companionship or solitude are far, far too complex to be summarized so easily. I may sound like an introvert, but I love to be onstage and I spend a perhaps surprising amount of time feeling quite lonely. But in fact, the nature of the social interaction can cause it very easily to flip from fulfilling to harmful. I do wish I talked to people more, but so often the more that I get leaves me feeling stressed out instead of fulfilled. So, originally forced by circumstances but now constrained by habit, I avoid as much of it as I possibly can. I rarely leave my apartment for fear of having an interaction that doesn’t work out, and I’ll be honest, from my point of view that’s most of them. I’d love to regain some balance, but it’s hard to know how.

Any ideas?

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¹ Trust them to ease their way onto the flutter board without getting me dunked in the water, you could say.