Despite the pandemic and social distancing guidelines, people continue to connect with friends—through Zoom, online games, socially distanced BYOF picnics and anything else they can come up with that allows them to spend time with friends and family in a safe manner. When schools first closed down in March, I too did my best to still keep in touch with friends and stay social despite all of us staying at home. However, due to my more introverted self, as time went by, I realized that staying at home could be good for me; I needed some time to myself to recharge and do some self-reflection. So, as time went on, I became more and more unreachable. I answered texts days or weeks late, declined social meetings and didn’t go about actively initiating conversations. I simply checked out and tried to focus more on myself, because I felt that I never got the time to do this. It was important to me to take this moment to breathe, to relax from all the busyness of day to day life when things were normal.
At first, I saw no issues with this: I was becoming more comfortable with myself without feeling the need for external validation. Having time to myself was good for me. However, as days turned into weeks, and weeks into months, I realized that little by little, I was drifting away from close friends. I realized that I was slowly damaging friendships, but I felt that I couldn’t stop. I wasn’t just socially distancing and taking self-care days anymore: I was actively isolating myself from friends. I suddenly just didn’t have the energy to keep up with people anymore, and so I didn’t. I became comfortable with this, so I thought that it was okay to keep doing this. However, I came to the realization that what started out as an important and well needed “pause” on life became an unhealthy way of coping with the pandemic. It was good that I took some time to myself, but I was now ONLY thinking about myself, ignoring how my friends might feel about this sudden lack of contact. This self-isolating lifestyle was going to slowly break the important friendships I had developed over the years.
Little by little, I started to reach out to people. It was difficult at first since I became so used to not talking to anyone and felt strange doing so again, but luckily I was able to pick up with my friends right where we left off.
Every now and then, I find myself slipping back into that mentality. It’s difficult to not be able to spend time with friends and only communicate virtually, so instead of missing friends, it can seem easier to just not talk to them at all, but this can be unhealthy and cause one to feel worse during already difficult times. I still feel the need to take self-care days every now and then to check in with myself and see where I am at, but I am making an effort to be more aware of the line between social distancing and self-isolation.