Social Isolation: That Time I Became an Introvert

    As kids, my brother and I would become annoyed at the way our father made conversation with people he didn't know, and found friends wherever he went. One particular time, we were traveling down the street in a taxi near his hometown when he yelled at the driver to stop and leaped out of the slowing vehicle. He had seen a friend of his on the sidewalk.

    It wouldn't surprise us one bit if our father made friends with a total stranger and invited them to dinner that night. He was gregarious and outgoing. He loved to make connections between people he knew, and solve problems with active networking.

    I am my father's daughter.

    When the term 'social isolation' entered the contemporary American lexicon, it sounded particularly horrid to me. It looked like a prison sentence, an elective loneliness, a forced solitude. The thought of being isolated from close friends and loved ones seemed to be a cruel side-effect of a pandemic disease.

    But when push came to shut-in, I found myself relishing the quiet, the peace and the time to buckle down and get my work done. I closed the door to my office at work that first week and posted a notice that said 'no visitors'. Strangely, no one ignored the sign and knocked anyway as people are wont to do. Somehow, the memo had gotten out that I meant business and anyhow, they didn't know if maybe I was isolating because I was carrying the disease!

    Now, I am faced with a week ahead where I will be working-from-home like so many today. As my job is deemed non-essential in the current state of affairs, I will be available by phone but not in my usual place. In a remarkable plot twist, I find myself actually looking forward to it: there are phone calls I can make, magazines to review and stories to write, emails to answer, and quite possibly - books to read.

    Yea, those six tomes that have been languishing on my night-stand while my work schedule has been so demanding are finally going to see the book-light. I even cracked one open the other night (and I do mean c.r.a.c.k.e.d....) and read a little.

    One of my favorite Twilight Zone (late 1950s-era television show) episodes is about a poor nebbish who longs to read but has an overbearing wife who hates books, and a bank clerk job that only allows him a meager lunch break to delve into reading. He is having lunch in the bank vault - relishing the aloneness and reading when a nuclear bomb decimates the city, leaving him the sole survivor. Gone are his fellow employees, gone is his demeaning boss, and gone is his cruel wife. What's left in the ruins? The great halls of the PVBLIC LIBRARY! He leaps for joy, for he now has All the Time In the World (the actual title of the episode!). It is a bookworm's perfect post-apocalyptic fairy tale: the promise of redemption through literature. (There is an actual twist ending that you have to see for yourself - YouTube it!)

    So for today, we have food, we still have utilities and running water, we have enough toilet paper, and now we have all the time in the world.