Living Your Best Life (Witte)

The world is not easy on introverts. You know, the folks who like to stay indoors, prefer socializing (if at all) on a one-to-one basis, and just can’t go to everything they are invited to because of their need to recharge. The message on TV is that you are not living your best life unless you are out skiing down a mountain, or clinking glasses with a group at the local pub. In other words, if you kind of like your own company, sometimes more than that of others, there is something majorly wrong with you.

And then comes the stay at home order in March of 2020 due to the attempt to flatten the curve of Covid-19. I had been watching the evening news in late January and February and saw horrible images of what was going on in China, people being dragged into vans to be tested and people’s doors being nailed shut to enforce quarantine. I knew that wasn’t going to happen here. In fact, I didn’t even believe Covid-19 would come here. I had this vision of an invisible disease barrier surrounding the country. No really, I did.

But then, it came. First with rumblings of what if? and advisories of having two months of medicine on hand. That’s all I needed to hear. Part of being an introvert has always included the need to be prepared to stay indoors. I did my panic-buying early. I was all set with paper and canned goods. I figured there’s always a hurricane we need to be prepared for, so I was good.

All around me, people were thinking it wasn’t that serious. Even before the actual stay-at-home was in place, I was avoiding the usual poetry readings I go to just in case. I was doing my own stay-at-home. I had my writing. I had my canned goods. I had the internet.

I watched as Italy shut down, then France, and Spain. I think that’s when it hit people. This thing has legs. I watched news reports of people swarming the stores, bare shelves, etc. and began my monastic journey. My husband and I are both retired and in vulnerable-to-Covid groups, so we really had to take the stay-at-home seriously.

But I wasn’t prepared for what came next. I felt a sense of bleakness the first week. What will happen? What if they stop letting us take walks? What will we do if we think we have Covid? And of course, the sickness itself. I was sanitizing the hand sanitizer bottles.

It was a whirlwind of doubt and horror that slowly became the everyday. And once I was able to right myself, to realize the best chance I had was to stay put, that there was nothing more I could do personally, I felt a tiny bit better.

My best chance to make sense of this was to simply stay home. Wait, I thought. I love to stay home. I love the feeling of not missing out on things because I didn’t feel like fighting the crowds in the subway, or sitting next to a noisy family at a restaurant. This could work. In fact, it slowly occurred to me that stay-at-home was not that much different than what I was already doing.

I had time to write, to read, to binge-watch, catch up with friends. I was ordering takeout without guilt. All of a sudden people were starting to gather on this thing called ZOOM. I was meeting people I’d only seen on Facebook and Twitter posts. This was major. This is what sustained me. Suddenly, I didn’t have to rationalize not attending conferences, and I didn’t have to feel bad for missing poetry readings. I was no longer feeling that subtle sense of shame introverts feel just because they like their own goddam company.

This stay-at-home has allowed me to thrive in a very important way. I’m busier now than I’ve been in a very long time. I go to ZOOM readings all the time, I co-host a monthly reading. I’m Facetiming with friends and relatives and have gotten a feeling of connection I had thought was lost.

But the most important thing is that I feel it’s all been equalized. I feel this has been sort of a golden age for introverts and that when life comes back to what we consider normal, my normal won’t seem so damn odd.

Francine Witte’s poetry and flash fiction have appeared in Wigleaf, Mid-American Review, Lost Balloon, Stonecoast Review, Moon Candy Review, and many others. Her latest books are Dressed Wrong for All This, (flash), The Theory of Flesh (poetry), and The Way of the Wind (novella). She lives in NYC.