It’s Time to Check on the Extroverts in Your Life. We Are Struggling.

I’ve reached the point where I hate my couch. I didn’t think that this would ever be possible. If anyone would have told me before, I would have had them committed. The house is joy and rest. It is the place where bad things can’t happen to you. It’s where a quality extrovert such as myself can recharge. And yet…I hate my couch.

I hate that we are still in a pandemic and from this couch, I watch about vaccine protests and then the number of deaths. I learned from this couch the term Covid Orphans. I hate that every week on this couch I get numerous emails from my kids’ schools that they have been exposed.

From this couch, I have had to research “TikTok Gun Threat” at my school and educate myself before I got yet another email from our school. I texted my daughter to see what she knew about this and how she told me 50% of her classmates are missing today because of this threat. I hate that it was on this couch that the pit in my stomach wouldn’t go away.

I hate that my couch was my principal’s office as I taught school last year to my three kids. Where one minute the couch and I were talking about Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven and the next I was going over algebra. Soft dark green felt will now always remind me of linear and binomial equations.

And it’s from this couch that I have missed my friends. No, more than just friends. The daily interaction of life where I joke with the random person on the street. Or talk to a stranger where you could really tell they just needed someone to genuinely ask how they were doing that day. I asked my couch if it wanted to talk about TikTok and our teenagers, or the stress that parents are under for the last 3 years. My couch did not respond.

Whether we want to admit it or not, the world has changed and it’s the extroverts that are suffering. We live for the interaction of life, and it’s been so long in wave after wave of the pandemic.

I know that there are those that will say that we need to go back to normal. Every time I hear that, I also hear the term Covid Orphan. Even though I am vaxxed and boosted, I think about those in my community who are not. And when I do go out, masked as well, it’s still different. Not slower, but angrier. It’s as if the common joke that would bring a smile has instead become a tension-filled gap where someone is being offended. It’s hard to be funny in a world when everyone is ready to yell.

The world cannot go back to “normal” because that term is meaningless. The better term is that we have to find a new way to live and interact. A way that sometimes happens over Zoom calls or from 6 feet away. A place where hate is on showcase every single day. That new normal is exhausting, even for us extroverts.

I get my energy from people and it directly affects my mood. When I crack a joke in a group, it’s because I absolutely cannot stand the uncomfortable silences in life. I don’t know why, but it’s a physical reaction. When the awkward moment stretches out too long, I immediately call it out for what it is because, again, I cannot help myself. And when I talk to people, when they are silent, I crave to hear their story. Not an “I’m fine,” but a “This one time, I went with a buddy…” These things are as essential to me as breathing. I am not an extrovert because I like the attention (although that is nice). I am an extrovert because my body won’t let me be anything else.

I need to talk, fight, and make jokes in rooms full of people. I need to see smiles the same as I need water to drink. I have to hear a laugh over something unexpected that I said. A deep sigh over something shocking that I said. A roll of the eyes over something stupid that I said.

Yes, I hear you, go back to normal. And again, there is not normal. It’s a tension-filled sea backed by anxiety that is usually lessened by being around people. But people have become the problem. Those that have to scream at teenagers working for pennies for forgetting a biscuit in a meal or that have to scream hate-filled slurs because people have asked them for some common decency.

I’m lucky that I still get together with my dad friends once a week and finally get a chance to leave my couch. And I do plan on hitting up museums that energize my brain over the next month. I’ll wear my mask and see if I can gain the inspiration of life that I have always sought. I’ll talk to my wife, argue with my children, and pet as many dogs as will let me. They always help. That has become my new normal.

But in the meantime, if you have an extrovert in your life, do us a favor. Tell us a story about that one time. It doesn’t have to be true. It doesn’t have to be exciting or funny. It just has to be authentic from you. Because that is what extroverts want. Just you.

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