Hermit Loner’s Place

Entering a Weekend College program at nearly 50 years of age, while employed full-time in a soul-sucking job, sometimes seems like an insane thing for me to have done.  But I’ve always been bothered by the fact that I never completed a four year degree.  I didn’t earn an Associate of Arts degree until 2003 - and I graduated high school in 1978!  I guess I’m a late bloomer. Finally, though, I’m in a position to be able to pursue a Bachelor’s Degree in Humanities and Fine Arts, and I’m going for it.

Well.  Being in college at this “mature” age, as a very strong introvert, poses its own set of rather unique challenges!  For one thing, every other Friday night I drive to the school, which is an hour from home. I have a dorm room there. I am in class till 10:30PM on Friday, and on Saturday from 8AM to noon. I quickly learned that in order to get ANY sleep in a dorm room, I need EARPLUGS.  Even though the floor I’m on ( as well as the one above it) is limited to adult students, a dorm is still a noisy place.

That’s not the worst of it, though. The SHOWER is the worst of it. I dislike public restrooms as it is. To me, bathroom stuff is private business. The idea of having to shower in a big dorm bathroom was terrifying to me. Even brushing my teeth next to someone else is uncomfortable. I took one look at the showers and freaked out. There are two shower stalls and in order to reach the ‘far’ one, you have to go through the ‘near’ one!  What sadistic person designed THAT?

Only another self conscious introvert with body image issues will fully understand my anxiety about the showers. I put a lot of energy into trying to figure out how to manage getting a shower without encountering anyone else. My first semester, this didn’t prove to be difficult, as my Saturday class was at noon, so I just waited to shower until the morning class gals were done and gone. But this semester, I am a morning class gal.  Luckily, my room is right next to the bathroom, so I can hear if someone is in there or not. The first Saturday morning, I waited till it was quiet, then ventured timidly forth, and went into the ‘far’ stall.

I was almost done when someone entered the ‘near’ stall and started showering!  I panicked. I didn’t know what to do. Now, I am so self conscious that I take a t-shirt into the shower with me, and hang it where it won’t get wet, so I can put it on when I’m done and get out without anybody seeing me naked. But there was no way around seeing the other person naked, which I didn’t want to do - I agonized for a few minutes and then decided, well, if she got in here, she must not have a problem with me coming out past her.  So I finished up, gathered my courage, excused myself, and got out as fast as I could, eyes averted, forgetting my body wash in my haste to escape.

Since then there have been no further shower encounters, but it still stresses me out to use a ‘public’ shower.

Another challenge is something I call “there’s one in every class.” This is a small school with small classes and in every class there is that student - the attention seeker, the one who seems to want to make sure that everyone knows she is on a first name basis with the professor. The one who starts talking the minute she arrives, at whoever happens to be handy. The one who is just obnoxiously pushy and opinionated, the one at whom others are secretly rolling their eyes. These people arouse the most intense hostility in me, and I don’t know why. Honestly, I can’t figure out why this behavior bothers me so much. And here’s the weirdest thing - these types seem to gravitate toward me - sit next to me, talk to me, push themselves at me. Why, I ask you?  Why?  Do any of you relate to this at all?  I try to be polite and tolerant, but really, I just wish these types would sit down and shut up!

There are definitely stresses involved in this college adventure, but the positive far outweighs the negative. I like my little dorm room. I go in and close the door and nobody bothers me. The college is in a tiny little town in the country, which is something I love; going there every other week is like a mini-retreat from my ‘real’ life, living in a city and working in a bigger city. Classes are interesting, the teachers are fantastic, the staff of the Weekend College are just amazing, maybe the most supportive and helpful group of people I’ve ever met. So, I can put up with scary showers and the class mouthpieces. And just maybe I’ll come out of this having overcome a few fears and being able to be more accepting of people who are very different from myself!

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I haven’t written anything in a while.  Life gets crazy and I get lazy.

Lately I’ve been thinking about getting old.  Mabel is 77 now.  On December 9, she fell and broke her hip.  She has been in and out of the hospital and rehab ever since.  We have been spending a lot of time visiting at the rehab, and we’re also having to think about what to do if Mabel can’t recover enough to come home.

And that makes me think about getting old, and becoming dependent, and having to be in a rehab or a nursing home - and these are very frightening prospects to anybody, but how much more so to an independent introvert?

Imagine.  As introverts, we are fiercely private and territorial.  We prize quiet and solitude.  What would it be like to be in a nursing home, forced to live with a roommate, who would probably want to watch TV all the time, at high volume of course, due to hearing loss?  Dependent on the care of strangers, even for intimate things.  No escape from other people, EVER.  Even needing help in the toilet.  My God.  I think I would go insane.

The noise alone would put me over the edge.  I suppose if you’re mostly deaf maybe the noise isn’t so bad, but what if you aren’t deaf, and all you want is peace and quiet, and you have to listen to a roommate’s TV all day long?  Hospitals, rehabs, and nursing homes are noisy. How is anyone supposed to recover from an illness or injury in such an unpeaceful environment?  I think even gregarious extroverts have trouble with it!  Mabel, for example, is very extroverted.  She loves to talk, she loves to be the center of attention at all times, she loves company and conversation.  But it’s even hard for her to be stuck in these places.

I lurk a lot on an elder care support board, because it hasn’t been easy, having Mabel here for going on twelve years now.  And all the time I see people posting that they have had to place their parent in a nursing home, where the poor parent is pushed to be more social, to eat with others, to participate in activities. Perhaps for some, this is beneficial - for Mabel, for example, who does need a nudge now and then, but who really does enjoy a lot of social activity.  But we aren’t all extroverts. Imagine the misery of an elderly introvert, forced to live in a group situation with other people, constantly being pushed to participate in social activities, with family and staff thinking “Oh, Mom’s depressed” or “Dad needs more interaction with people” when all poor introverted Mom or Dad really wants is to be left alone.

God.  I’m horrified at the prospect of ever ending up like that . . .I would rather die. Do any of you ever think about this?

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My new cubicle arrangement has proven to be very effective at allowing me to discourage talkers. If someone walks up and I feel like engaging in conversation, I turn around to face him or her. If I don’t feel like talking (or, more accurately, listening), I simply don’t turn around. Even our most clueless guy gets THAT hint and goes away pretty quickly if I don’t turn around. I’m really happy with this but being the nice person that I am, I sometimes feel a bit badly about “rejecting” most of the talkers most of the time.

But I realized something this morning. I’m going to be fifty years old next summer. I have a full time job, a house, a partner, a family. I’m taking a full course load at college, working my butt off. I only have a finite amount of energy on any given day, and I need it for the things I choose to do. If I allow every Tom, Dick, and Harry who wants to talk at me during the day to siphon off my energy, I don’t have any left when I go home, and that’s a bad thing. I have every right to choose which conversations I’ll have and which I won’t (necessary work conversations excepted, of course). I am not being mean to others by declining to accommodate them every time they want to talk to me. I am being kind to myself and to my loved ones by conserving my precious energy for the things that really matter to me.

There are enough things in life that we have to do - we don’t have to let other people drain us of energy just because they feel like talking. It really does cost me a lot to pretend polite interest when someone is going on about something I don’t care about. It’s better to just refuse to turn around. The talker can easily find someone else to talk to, and I get to be left alone.

So there is my “sermon” for today!

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Have you ever noticed that in the workplace, rewards and tokens of appreciation are geared toward extroverts?

Where I work, my boss’s favorite way to thank the group for a job well done is to buy us all lunch. That is wonderful and all but it’s not a reward for me. For me, it’s a punishment. My lunchtime routine is to grab something at my desk while I’m working, and then LEAVE for a solitary walk, to get away from the office, away from people, and recharge for the afternoon. When the boss buys lunch, it means that I don’t get to do that.

The first couple of times he did it, I simply opted out, only to hear from coworkers that apparently my failure to participate really bothered him. So now when he buys lunch for the group, I join them, reluctantly. And instead of getting my badly needed hour of ‘alone time,’ I sit at our big lunch table with about 13 other people, enduring their noisy conversation, eating something that isn’t what I would have really liked, in most cases, and trying to figure out if I can spend my obligatory “hour with the team” and still sneak out for a walk later.

Every year the division that oversees our group puts on a holiday “Employee Appreciation Event.” Again, this is a nice thing to do and most people enjoy it. I do not. If you want to appreciate me, how about giving me an extra paid day off? THAT, I would enjoy! At last year’s event, one of our group members was presented with an award. This fellow doesn’t enjoy parties and had to be dragged from his office to get up in front of everyone, endure a little speech from our director, and accept his award in front of maybe a hundred people. It was obviously painful for him and he fled back to his office the minute he could get away. What kind of reward is that, making someone the center of attention who doesn’t want to be?

I got an award once, at this job. I did not attend the dinner event at which the awards were handed out. There was no way I wanted to get up in front of people and be the center of attention, not even for five minutes.

The latest thing in my little group is that it’s been decided it’s again time for a group lunch but this time, the boss wants to take us out. That is even worse than getting something in. I do NOT want to ride in a car with people I work with to some restaurant where I’m completely trapped for the duration of the lunch. It’s just not my idea of fun. And since I hate city driving, taking my own car isn’t going to happen. I’d really rather just opt out. But then I look like an antisocial ingrate and the boss will get his feelings hurt. So I guess I’ll either suck it up and go, or wait till they pick a day and then take that day off, which is what I did last time they planned a lunch out. I just took the day off - dilemma solved!

Managers, hear my plea. Your introverted employees don’t like the same things your extroverted ones do. If you want to buy everyone lunch or something, that’s great, but can you please excuse us without taking it personally, if we don’t want to participate? If it’s supposed to be a reward, then let us opt out without making us feel guilty. Better yet, why not reward people individually in ways that suit each person? You don’t need to buy me lunch or take me out. In fact, I’d really prefer that you not. Give me an extra day off instead, or give me a gift certificate to a bookstore, or something like that. And whatever you do, don’t make it a big deal. Don’t ever put me in the spotlight or make me the center of attention. That’s more like punishment than a reward to your average introvert. Make a fuss over your extroverts, who will eat it up. Your introverts would really prefer to go their own way and be left out of the spotlight. Thanks!

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Well, we all know introverts are great and we’re just fine the way we are.  Right?  You bet!

I am back in school now, finally pursuing that liberal arts degree I’ve always wanted.  In one of my classes, a writing class, I have to do a big research project.  We had a list of topic choices, all based on different pieces of writing.  You can imagine my excitement when I saw that one of the works we could use for our project was an essay called “The Rewards Of Living A Solitary Life,” by a woman named May Sarton.  Needless to say, I picked that for my topic. I’ve had great fun learning about her and my overall project is about - you guessed it - introversion.  Now, our professor wants our entire project to reflect research, so I have had to do some digging and I’ve found some great material.  One journal article I found in particular has some great things to say.  Its author is a man named Arnold Henjum and just to be entirely proper, here is the citation for the article:

Henjum, Arnold. “INTROVERSION: A MISUNDERSTOOD “INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCE” AMONG STUDENTS.” Education 103, no. 1 (Fall82 1982): 39. Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection, EBSCOhost (accessed November 12, 2009).

In this article, Henjum says that it’s successful introverts “who keep this country functioning and moving forward.  In fact, most of our scientists, engineers, accountants, doctors, writers, artists and musicians are introverted and clearly essential to the maintenance of our dynamic society.”

Rock on, sir!

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Cubicle, sweet cubicle.  That higher wider wall makes a world of difference.  What privacy fencing did for my yard, this wall has done for my cubicle.  I wish I would have thought of this two years ago.  I am no longer a sitting duck for every bored coworker who hasn’t got enough work to do.  They have to make an effort now to see me, and it’s no longer a comfortable space to just “hang out” in.

At first I was leery about posting this picture, fearing that someone from work might someday find this blog.  Then I realized - nobody ever will.  They don’t care about me as a person, what I think, or how I feel.  In fact, one of my friends at work knows about this blog and I am 100% sure he never reads it.  (It’s a good thing, too, because he’d likely see himself in some of my posts and I think he wouldn’t be happy about it)  Anyway, I’m convinced that for the most part, my coworkers only want a few things from me - my attention, my listening ear, my answers to their questions, my help with their problems - they couldn’t care less what makes me tick.  They want me to listen to their stories and laugh at their jokes.  I’m an audience to them, when I’m not playing “Answer Fairy.”  They want me to be what they want me to be - and quite frankly, I’m tired of it. If any of them DO stumble across this and don’t like what they read here, “oh well.”

I love my “new” cubicle.  Today was blessedly quiet.  Here’s to lots more quiet days to come.

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This week, a colleague and I each got so fed up with the situation at work that we hatched a scheme to cut down on some of the socializing in our office by having me switch desks with a different colleague.  It’s too complicated to fully explain, but my desk is in a large room within our office.  I share that space with two other people and an empty cubicle. (The empty cubicle is actually not an asset.  Its chair seems very inviting to every bored extrovert who wants to come in, sit down, and talk my ear off, without concern for my time.) This large room, because it’s out of management’s direct sight, I guess, has become a sort of unofficial “break room” for any bored coworker who wants to just hang out and talk. (As you can imagine, I hate this.) The person with whom I was going to switch (Y) gets a lot of  legitimate work related traffic to his cubicle, which is near my co-conspirator’s (let’s call him X) cube, and the noise drives X nuts when he’s trying to concentrate.  So, X and decided that if I switched cubes with Y, most of the office traffic would funnel into the “Country Club” as we call it, from which I would escape.  It would benefit X and me both.  I talked to Y and he was agreeable, so I approached my boss.

And was met with resistance.  He has a long term plan for the “Country Club.”  He did not understand how it would benefit the office for me and Y to switch cubes.  He was clearly very uncomfortable with my request and turned it into a really big deal.  He would have to talk to Y’s cube neighbors as well as mine to make sure this would be OK with everyone.  I was stunned and felt terrible after talking to him. He didn’t say “No,” but he made it clear he wasn’t in my corner.  So this morning I told him to forget it. X was not pleased but I didn’t want to push the issue with my boss, who has always been good to me.

So, this morning, there I was, sitting at my cube in the “Country Club,” wondering what I could do to make things better.  And I realized that the empty cube had a wall panel a foot higher and a foot wider than the side panel of my own cube.  Eureka.  Let’s swap those panels.  I wasn’t about to ask permission for THAT.  I had a couple of guys help me and soon I had a taller, wider side on my cube. It makes a world of difference.  Not only that, my immediate cube neighbor took the shorter panel from my cube to create a wall where she hadn’t had one.  So now, we are more “closed off” from the rest of the room.  My new wall is tall enough that people won’t be able to hang over the top of it to talk at me, which they DID do with the shorter one.  It will no longer be so easy for people to come in and park in the empty cube and talk to me - they can’t see me now from there, because I have an extra foot of wall between me and that cube.

My cubicle looks much less “inviting” now. I moved my monitors around to put my back squarely toward the small opening that I now have.  Hopefully the whole setup says “Move on, please don’t come here and hang around.”

Ironically, X is one of the worst “park and talk” offenders.  He isn’t too happy about the new arrangement, but that’s too bad.  X doesn’t like to be distracted but fails to realize how often he distracts ME.  And he gives me a hard time if I say anything.  Late this afternoon, after most people had left, he and another guy came to bother me.  I tried to get them to leave and they wouldn’t.  So I discovered a wonderful weapon and I’m going to keep it “locked and loaded” at all times, from now on.  I pointed my web browser at http://www.simplynoise.com/ and cranked it.  They left in a hurry!!

Small victories, but I left work happy for the first time in a LONG time.

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Well, mostly I wish I could retire, but until that day comes (and it is a few years away unless I hit that MegaMillions jackpot!) I’d settle for an office of my own, with a door I could close.

I just realized today that one of my job’s biggest frustrations is the constant interruptions.  I could probably cope with them if I were just doing rote work, simple task oriented jobs, but many times I have bigger projects to work on that involve laying out a strategy, learning new software, researching something, or just plain plowing through a hundred or so pages of documentation.  I don’t care for that kind of work anyway, so it’s always difficult for me to get started on it.  I am the queen of procrastination when it comes to projects.  I can always find lots of really important things to do instead of starting a project - you know, mission critical things like organizing my desk drawers or culling old software and driver CDs.  There is always something really urgent to do.  But eventually, I am always forced to grit my teeth and dig into whatever project I’ve got.  And it never fails.  I’ve finally taken the plunge.  I’m deep in thought, reading through a manual or working through a complex installation or what-have-you and then It Happens.  The “CUBICLE VISIT.”  You know what I’m talking about.  The coworker who just wants to tell you all about his weekend, or the one who wants to ask you the same question you’ve already answered for her about ten times, or the guy who wants you to check out this hilarious website RIGHT NOW.  And *poof*, there goes your concentration, your motivation, you’re back to Square One or worse.  And, God forbid you show any bit of irritation or impatience - oh, no, that would be RUDE.  You must always welcome these interruptions with a smile and a demeanor that says “I’m glad you stopped by!  I wasn’t doing anything important.  Please, talk to me.  I have nothing I’d rather be doing than listening to you.”  SIGH.

I really do think that if our office space allowed it, my boss would probably give me my own office.  Not because I’m any sort of hotshot, but because he would understand why I want and need it.  Unfortunately, our space does not allow it, so there I sit, every day, a literal sitting duck for anyone who wants to stop by and ruin my concentration.

I really think I’d be a much nicer person and much more productive if I had my own office or could work from home!

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Quick thought for the day - we never come to you because you don’t give us a chance. You are always coming to us, so we get tired, and just want to be left alone.

I never get the chance to find out if I’d ever be moved to “cubicle hop” and go talk to someone, because I have always got someone at my desk, chattering at me! Leave me alone, people, I beg you!

Seriously, I wonder if all of my visitors would just leave me alone, what would happen?  If nobody ever came to my desk to talk to me, would I ever feel the need or desire to go talk to someone?  Would I get bored?  Would I get lonely?  I honestly don’t know.

Thank goodness, today has been pretty quiet, so far. I am feeling even less sociable than I usually do, and I must be giving off ‘hostile’ vibes.  People are pretty much leaving me be, which is just how I like it.  I can usually muster up the energy to be kind and patient when people come to talk to me, but today the well is dry; I really want to be left alone.  I have problems and concerns and worries of my own.  I don’t want to hear those of my coworkers.  I haven’t got the energy to care, today.

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I haven’t had much time to write here lately, being busy with work, school, and worrying about our beloved Rottweiler who has cancer.  But I found this beautiful poem while doing some research for a paper, and I want to post it here, because it describes my own feelings very, very well.  Perhaps some of you will relate, also!

The Solitary

My heart has grown rich with the passing of years,
I have less need now than when I was young
To share myself with every comer
Or shape my thoughts into words with my tongue.

It is one to me that they come or go
If I have myself and the drive of my will,
And strength to climb on a summer night
And watch the stars swarm over the hill.

Let them think I love them more than I do,
Let them think I care, though I go alone;
If it lifts their pride, what is it to me
Who am self-complete as a flower or a stone.

Sara Teasdale

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