I had a guy over a month or so ago, for two weeks. He wasn't sleeping with me or anything, he was at a hotel in a nearby town and we just met up to hang out for large portions of the day for that entire timespan. I basically went from total isolation for years to what felt like a 7-5 job that was nothing but social interaction, all the time, every day, for the only break I'd had in nearly a year by then.
I am an extreme introvert. If you couldn't already tell from the "total isolation" bit, I really do not like in-person interaction with people and even half an hour with someone I enjoy will tire me out to the point of needing half a day's rest to recover. I used to like people way more, but I've always become this tired from social interaction and eventually I decided to just save myself the trouble and stop seeing people so often entirely. That turned out to be pretty good timing, given COVID's attack a few years later driving everyone completely mad.
I was already on the verge of exhaustive collapse when this guy came over, and I figured that once he was over I'd completely fall apart. I wasn't entirely wrong: the first week was full of days that just got cut short because I would be physically unable to continue, and no matter the situation I would just shut down or start falling asleep.
The second week, however, I started powering through enough to actually get through the day. I was actually enjoying myself. I felt a kind of wholeness that I can't remember feeling past, what, age 10? 9? Since I was last in situations where I'd be meeting people on the daily and forced to make friends.
And then he left, and now I'm back to the same way I was feeling before. In some sort of suspended motion, too tired to do much at all, grinding through (currently) 10-hour days of self-imposed work 7 days a week as set-up for some promised future that I have an intense nagging suspicion will never come to fruition.
I didn't like the guy romantically. He didn't like me that way either. This was a strictly platonic affair, and it's left me longing for a world where shit like that can just... happen, every day, if you put your mind to it.
A world where you can walk outside, see public spaces bustling with people you've got a lot in common with, and shoot your shot with some random guy you didn't know a year ago. Where you can organize something and have people show up to it, genuinely interested in whatever the fuck you put together and willing to put their minds to work making it happen, instead of having half the people bail last-minute (without notice) and the remaining half who showed up pay almost no attention to your fruitless efforts. Where you can learn new things just by talking to people and taking initiative.
I don't think this is that world, even if I'm now willing to put in the effort to try and make it one. I don't really think that kind of world ever existed. But I feel like there used to be something much closer to this, didn't there? I keep seeing bits of it scattered about in how old people talk and behave, and how even older (now passed) people recorded their lives in the past. I swear I even have memories of this kind of shit when I was a child, but that's probably just due to people being unlikely to deny entertaining weird loud kids who bug them with questions about dromedaries and cool jets.
I think I'm just tired of the entire world looking alien to me. I doubt it would have looked much more familiar to me in any other time period, but I can't help but feel that I would have been able to at least understand the differences of those times much more easily than I can today's. Even the internet, my one consistent source of human interaction for ages now and easily the most familiar place to me in the world at the moment, feels completely alien and more different (for the worse) with each passing year. Feels like I'm losing what few roots I had in the first place, and now I'm just some floating sapling lost in a really loud river.
What I'm saying is: I feel like an old lady in my 20s, lmao. Maybe I should start crocheting and making cookies or something and just embrace it.