Covid 19 coronavirus: How lockdown really sucks for extroverts

An extrovert is a person who draws energy from others - and being on their own may be especially hard. Photo / 123rf

COMMENT: A lifelong extrovert, Rowan Pelling of the Daily Telegraph is feeling a growing urge to rebel against enforced isolation

So here we are, in the fifth week of UK lockdown, and the population has formed two distinct camps.

The introverts are like cows in clover; there's now a state-sanctioned campaign to avoid other human beings.

As for the extroverts, with each passing day they're more like the fox that will chew off a limb rather than stay caught in a steel trap.

Many households, like mine, divide down the middle. My husband and 16-year-old son have spent their lifetimes prepping to embrace isolation and their favourite pursuits, which largely involve headphones, laptops and a room of their own.

I've long said of my spouse that his ideal scenario for listening to a new album would be alone in a nuclear bunker.

But my 12-year-old son and I are in agony - cut off from the world, gossip and friends.

I miss the way you can pick up on other people's mood and thoughts in a real room; the unique, electric buzz of human vitality. Photo / 123rf

We make group calls to friends on Zoom and Houseparty together from my bed, like two shipwrecked socialites on a tiny raft.

After two weeks off lessons, Boy 2 said to me, "Mum, you know when you're homesick?" I nodded and he went on, "Well, I feel like that about school. I'm school-sick." But what's closer to the truth is that this pandemic has made us both friend-sick.

I've been through two weeks of mild coronavirus, but none of my symptoms felt as bad as my current state of pining for people.

I should probably have anticipated this level of distress.

The first time someone explained to me that the definition of an extrovert isn't just someone who's sociable (introverts can be outgoing in the right circumstances) but a person who draws energy from others, a light bulb went on in my head.

I recognised at once that my inner engine is 100 per cent people-powered.

For as long as I remember, I've felt revitalised in social situations - even if parties ran to dawn - and been happy to kick-start a conversation with strangers.

My childhood was uniquely well suited to being extremely gregarious: my parents had five children and ran a country pub, so throngs of people were the default setting.

I've constantly gathered friends throughout my 52 years on this planet and am good at keeping them.

Group video-calls make you feel like you're in a spaceship, waving back at Earth. Photo / 123rf

My mum, who never balked at the packs of friends I asked back to the pub, used to say wistfully, "If you put as much energy into your work as you put into your social life you'd be running the country."

And now, wham! We extroverts are under house arrest and it's messing with our heads and depleting our spirits.

"Look, I'm just gonna say it," tweeted the usually gregarious actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus on Sunday, with a close-up photo of her own face, "I'm f***ing sick of myself."

I'm lucky enough to live in a house with three other people, but - love them though I do - they're people who deplete my inner resources, rather than amplify them. They need feeding, tending and listening to, and my sons need help with homework.

Their father roams around muttering, "I'm not going to wear a bloody mask, so shoot me!", or, "Why does anyone want to travel in any case?"

I feel like I'm living with a man in an H G Wells novel who's lost his time machine, but keeps trying to return to 1895.

I prop up my menfolk emotionally, but they're not equipped to do the same thing for me. Historically, that's been the job of 20 or so dear friends.

Emotional maintenance is most effectively performed face-to-face, with light refreshments. Photo / 123rf

I hear you introverts muttering it's impossible to have that many intimate friends and I assure you that you're plain wrong.

But the emotional maintenance is most effectively performed face-to-face, with light refreshments.

The social meet-up apps offer some solace, but not enough; it's hard to make a quip or aside on Zoom, which allocates its spotlight to the most assertive person on a group call rather than the funniest.

It's impossible to break off into a spontaneous, quieter pairing to gossip, before returning to the herd.

I miss the way you can pick up on other people's mood and thoughts in a real room; the unique, electric buzz of human vitality.

• Covid19.govt.nz: The Government's official Covid-19 advisory website

In the end, group video-calls make you feel like you're in a spaceship, waving back at Earth.

I asked the psychoanalyst and writer Anouchka Grose why the current world felt so excruciatingly hard for the outgoing at the moment.

She said, "Extroverts have a very strong need to be responded to. They almost feel as if they've died if they're not in constant dialogue with the world - even if it's just a visual dialogue of wearing loud clothes and being looked at."

That's when I confessed I'd started an Instagram picture-diary of me wearing crazy vintage gear.

Grose laughed and said that unlike introverts, my type of person isn't good at being "quietly satisfied", but needs some form of "witness" to our "thoughts and actions. It's as if they only half-exist without that."

This is worryingly true. I've had to become creative to feed my need for real-life dialogues.

When we're finally able to hug our friends again, it will be a wonderful day. Photo / 123rf

I've noted the Thursday-night claps for the NHS are an excellent time to shout across the road at neighbours and exchange news.

I've had a furtive liaison with a female friend on a street near Newnham in my home town of Cambridge.

We stood on opposite sides of a narrow road and I lobbed her birthday present into her bike basket, while exchanging tidings.

I have a circle of three school-gate mum friends and, as an Easter treat, we assembled early evening at one of our houses - placing one of us at each of the corners of her front garden, four metres apart (far safer than going to our local Co-op) and visible to the street, so our impeccable distancing was beyond question.

We brought our own drinks and spent a blissful 40 minutes interacting and weeping with laughter, because the relief was so immense. (NB, lest you wonder, I'm more than a fortnight out of quarantine.)

The few passers-by, and a neighbour wheeling out a bin, nodded benign benedictions. A few even confessed to having done something similar.

I'm sorry if you think less of me now, but it's possible some form of cosmic justice is being dished out.

Under normal circumstances, introverts say they're penalised for shunning after-work drinks, golf with the boss and birthday celebrations.

But in the time of coronavirus they gain a zillion brownie points for just being themselves, while people like me become pariahs.

In the post-coronavirus world, perhaps we'll better value both personality traits.