An extrovert in isolation.
As part of one of our stranger grad school assignments, I had to take the official Myers-Briggs personality test. This was years ago now, but I still remember that the results showed that my “extroversion levels” were as high as they measured. Those results weren’t exactly surprising to me. I like people. I get energy from connecting with other humans. This is something I’ve known about myself for a long time, but I think it became easy for me to forget after I became a teacher. There is just SO much human interaction in teaching. Constantly. Not just with the kids, of course, but also with colleagues and parents.
By the end of regular school days, I’m often so tired that all I want is quiet. I put off returning phone calls because I’m always too tired after work to talk to anyone else. Sometimes, after days with lots of meetings or conferences after a full school day, I come home & just lay on my bed in silence. I find it a lot harder to go to social events during the school week, even if they are things I really enjoy, just because I’m often drained from all the human interaction that comes from being an elementary school teacher.
During the school year, it’s easy for me to forget how extroverted I am, since most of that energy goes into my job. But, right now, with basically all of life canceled and my work changed drastically since the shift to distance learning, my extrovert heart is… not doing well.
I MISS HUMANS. I miss humans so much that I wave and smile at everyone we see on our socially distanced neighborhood walks, that I was delighted when Sean wanted to stop for burgers yesterday because it meant we got to interact with a human for 30 seconds while placing our order, that I feel the gap of real human interaction everytime I do yet another video call. It’s just not the same, and that weighs on me in a way I didn’t realize it would.
I’m not quite sure what it was about this week, but this is the week I hit my breaking point. Maybe it was because I was still healing from being sick. Maybe it was because it was spring break, so I didn’t have the norms of my routine & even the distant interactions with my students and coworkers to ground me. Maybe it’s because schools are now officially closed for the year and the last hope of returning to work this spring is officially gone. Maybe it was that it’s been FIVE weeks of this already and any return to “normal” feels hopelessly far away.