Quarantine loneliness

This Text belongs to Andreea Retinschi but i post it here cause i fully agree.

At the beginning of quarantine I wondered what I would discover, I imagined dozens of video calls with friends. I kept waiting for a change in me, to realize who I miss, to have epiphanies. As the days passed, I began to move further and further away from people, I did not miss them, I did not feel lonely, and when I said "I'm here if you want to talk" I hoped that the other person would not accept the offer. I wondered if I was flawed (out of order), reading what other people wanted.

People's need for other people, for sociability seems completely normal and understandable to me. Even if I don't feel the same way. I understand those who can't wait to resume their normal life, to return to their previous activities.
I did not have the courage to say that I was afraid that the quarantine would end too soon and the noise would come back and people would return. My friends asked me if I was okay, what I was doing so I wouldn't go crazy and I was a little ashamed of my answer.
I'm fine like that. I like quarantine.

Throughout my life I have wondered if I like people or not. I like talking to people, especially those from whom I have something to learn. I like people, but in small doses, within my limits, to have the posibility to say "ready, now each other at his own place". It is difficult for me to understand the need of others for a constant human presence.

Since I was little I been most alone, I did not need the presence of other people. I felt ashamed to talk to other people or other children so I avoided or ignored them. I prefered to spend hours outside with the puppies and cats from the neighborhood. I had my books that I consumed as food, I had cartoons, then movies at the cinema and always animals. When I reached adolescence, things changed and I started looking for friends.

I often fed on people's energy and I was in places with a lot of people, sometimes it was easy, sometimes very hard. I am selective with the people I choose to talk to or around whom I live.
I never got bored alone, but I often got bored with other people.
I've been sometimes also blamed that I am not polite to people, that I let them see that I did not want to talk to them or stay in their presence and that I have not been  able to change or disguise. There are people I would talk to for hours and there are people who make me feel every second how a Chinese drop flows through the verbally changed banalities. We’ve been sent good weather - people.

When I lived in Toronto for 7 years, I often noticed this need of those there: "chilling" or "hanging out". This chilling had an explanation in its name, more specifically not to expect something special, basically two or more people were sitting together and doing nothing. It was boring and I felt like I was doing my homework while sitting with them, but I couldn't wait to go alone to really "have fun".

I also often treated my depression through loneliness, when I felt it starting to wrap me in liquid and black arms, I took at least 2 days without human contact. It often worked because I found an inner peace in the silence around me. I have slowly learned to realize when I needed solitude and when it is not beneficial for me to reject those around me. Because it often helps more to kick yourself up, go out with people and do something. The line was fine, I could always grope in the dark.

My need for solitude was often missunderstood, at home or in relationships. I always felt that I had to fight for my space, to explain that I had always been like that, and that it was not something personal. Grandma didn't understand either, she grew up with a brother, mother, father, grandparents and then later lived in a house with other families.
In relationships the struggle was even more acute, being difficult for others not to take it personally, to accept my sentences that started too often with "me" and not with "us" and my need for real physical space, measured in days sometimes . I often felt it accepted as a joke, as some people in relationships do when they pretend to be okay with something, secretly hoping it's something temporary. And I always felt guilty when I asked for my space and even if I didn't say it out loud, I wondered what was wrong with me. Maybe that's why I like cats, because they are more independent and do not constantly need your presence.


I honestly think you have no way of knowing who you really are and what you want if you jump from relationship to relationship, without taking a break for yourself to get to know yourself. I always remember a movie whose name I forgot, in which the protagonist prefers breakfast depending on the man she was in a relationship with, sometimes omelet, sometimes mesh, sometimes boiled, I think she actually hated eggs.

We are not halves who have to look hard for their other half. We are people with different shapes, sometimes with gaps in us, but those gaps can be filled with other things than other people. I have always choosen to fill in the gaps in me with experiences and a difficult struggle to love myself, as I was not taught by those who were supposed to teach me, so now I am learning this on my own. If you do not love yourself, it is difficult for you to accept the love of others. You look for her, you ask for her and when you receive her you are surprised and then suspicious, how can someone love me, there must be something wrong.


I feel that when I need a day or two for myself, I always do it thinking about that saying "When you're in the woods, you can't see the forest of trees." So I go out of the woods and look at it from a distance, and then I felt it's my choice to go back. I need to know that any relationship is a continuous choice, you are not obliged to stay with someone, regardless of whether you are in a long-term relationship, whether you are married or living together.

Loneliness for me is not loneliness. Loneliness for me are the moments when I stop the world from whining, let it get quiet and I can listen to myself, to ask myself how I am, what I need, what has changed, what needs to change.

When the quarantine rises, we will not all run to other people. Social anxiety can be deconstructed as a fear of people, and now with the existence of the virus, people are the danger, in more ways than one.

In this time that is new to everyone, our brain decides defense mechanism. Some sleep more, others eat more. Others cannot sleep, they cannot eat. Some are looking for all their friends, including old ones, others are easily isolated from everyone. As usual, the best thing is everything in moderation. A defense mechanism is there to protect you, but the defense mechanism comes from things recorded in the subconscious and as we know those who go to therapy, not all things in the subconscious and not all defense mechanisms are necessarily good for you.
My defense was a form of loneliness and isolation. He protected me. Otherwise, I feel like I'm looking out at life like I'm in a glass dome. The quarantine continues.