Finding Community and Building Solidarity for Socially Exhausted Introverts*

People are exhausting, or perhaps more accurately, interactions with people are exhausting:

• Decoding the nonverbal microexpressions and hand gestures, tones of voice and fidgets and tells.
• The verbal communication, too: not just the words, but also their sound, the speed, the flow.
• Putting the two together. Deconstructing them to find the incongruities and discrepancies. Reconstructing them.
• Deciding if these inputs make a person or group safe or unsafe... during and after every single encounter.
• Judging them.
• Not judging them.
• Showing them you see and hear them.
• Willing them to see and hear you.
• Wanting them to have the answers you can't and never have been able to find within yourself.
• Being disappointed when they don't.
• Trusting them when they encourage you to find your answers.
• Being done with them.
• Missing them and wanting to be around them again.
• Trying to figure out if they ever wanted to be around you.
• The contradictions between your conditioning that says they're avoiding you, versus not quite believing the more positive alternatives.
• The contradictions between your conditioning that says they're just being nice, or want something from you, versus not quite believing you can trust them.
• Trying to communicate your needs in conversation (like when you absolutely cannot tolerate eye contact) as well as your other needs while balancing theirs while not putting theirs ahead of yours while they may not be able to put yours ahead of theirs either.

Among these overwhelming observations are the small moments that tell you whether and how much you have anything in common. If you're paying attention, you find the keys to all your future interactions:

• Share a love for nature? You might be able to volunteer together for river cleanups or community gardening.
• You have neurodivergent children? Arrange sensory-friendly playdates. Reschedule them when someone – you, your child – is having a bad day.
• The faith you doubt? Just decide to gather, two or three, in the name of friendship.
• Agree your workplace could be compensating or treating you better? Find out if a local union has introvert-friendly tasks you can contribute to while getting support.
• Enjoy the same kinds of music and/or movies? Find where buskers play, listen to them, tip them (hey, it's live music without the crowds).

Sometimes, of course, it won't work out. It can't.

• You think you share values, but you find you're expected to keep giving long past the point of depletion. You're not even sure they see your needs as valid relative to theirs.
• They already have enough friends, and despite the things in common, don't seem eager to make room for one more.
• They're more interested in people they can bring into their orbit, than they are in dancing.
• Spending time around them makes you feel tired or confused or stressed or even sick in ways you may not be able to explain.
• Local opportunities are few and far between, and you both struggle to make room for each other around work and life.

And then you have to start over, and that's exhausting too, especially when you fear you're running out of time, that the Universe is not so much benevolent as indifferent, much less that it will provide what you need when you need it.

But the alternatives are inertia and stagnancy, and you realize -- even as you stop and sit and rest a bit, or a while -- you don't want those either, and you find a way to keep going.

Maybe at some point, you even find people and activities who energize you, and that's the most important social cue of all for introverts: those who make you want to socialize.

*The kind of "introversion" I've described here also describes neurodiversity, autism in particular, but also CPTSD. I've deliberately left out "find a therapist" because I know it's often inaccessible and not necessarily high quality, but therapy can be a good option for introverts.