Staying Out

This week, I played a game with myself called “pretend my apartment has been affected by an unpleasant, embarrassing, lingering sewage problem”. There’s only one rule: Don’t stay at home for more than an hour at a time (unless I’m sleeping or making a good-faith effort). And, like all proper curses, I’m not allowed to tell anyone (until this morning when I’m posting this blog post about it).

I thought about this as an exercise in change and acceptance. I’d like to form more, closer friendships, but I am naturally laid-back and introverted. There’s an inside joke in my family that the best way to make friends is to befriend one extrovert and then befriend all of their friends. I always feel it should be possible to become more gregarious myself, cut out the middleman, and make all my own friends, but that takes a lot of effort that I can’t always summon.

I often joke (and I think it’s true) that I would make a good recluse. I’m independent and comfortable in my own company. But at the same time, other people are so interesting and add so much richness to life. If I could live 100 concurrent lives, I would probably let myself be a recluse in at least 10 of them, but as it is, with just the one, other people are too good to pass up.

So there’s tension between change and acceptance. It’s hard to do both at once. Attempting (maybe even merely desiring) change undermines acceptance. This “game” was an attempt to avoid the dilemma. Instead of framing things as a balance between being outgoing and passive, I just made up some arbitrary rule to follow that (maybe) correlates with being more social. And I love following rules.

I say maybe correlated because I realized that all the friends I’ve made in the past have been because I passively hung around some place (school or work). I’m kind of banking on this being a false tension and that I can have my cake and eat it too.

My strategy, like the rules, was simple. Since the goal is to concede as little as possible of “my nature” while satisfying the rules, I tried to only do at home what I had to: cleaning, showering, cooking (as much as I love other people, I’m not eating out for them for a whole week). Everything else, work, writing, reading, watching movies, should be done elsewhere. The rest of the time I can fill up with social engagements that I would normally do, chess, pickleball, climbing, Hinge dates.

Overall, the experience was positive, and much easier than I anticipated (although I failed a few times. Usually in the morning or evening I stayed at home between 1-2 hours while getting ready for work). I started last Friday after work with climbing and dinner with friends, and I’m ending it today after work (although I’m going to see Into the Woods with a friend, so it will sort of continue until some time tomorrow). I started with the weekend because I expected that to be the hardest part just because I had to fill up two full days, but it was easy thanks to beautiful weather and a lot of pickleball.

Going in to work every day was harder (boohoo, I know, the thing that almost everyone has done ever). It’s hard to believe that I used to do that every week. It was well-timed because I recently switched teams/buildings, so I wanted to see how often my new team comes in (not often, but the building is much nicer). I do feel much more productive, but there are confounding factors.

I’ll spare you a full rundown of my week but just mention a few things that stood out to me. Obviously I can’t claim that any of these things happened because of my hare-brained idea, just that they certainly wouldn’t have happened if I had stayed home.

• I have a tradition where I always tell my friend an amazing thing I saw on my Saturday long run that I would have taken a picture of if I had my phone. A few weeks ago, I saw a whole V of geese flying under the Fremont bridge. This week, crossing the same bridge (very early in the morning), I saw two ducks on Lake Union when there were no boats and the water was very still, so the ducks’ wake extended across the whole canal.

• On the same run, I ran into a free coffee and donuts promotional event and got invited to a running club the next week. (These are not invitation only, but I hadn’t seriously considered going before)

• Someone at the cookbook store near my house sells homemade soup to raise money for brain cancer research. I had some delicious vegan red bean soup and joined the waitlist for her soup club. Unclear what that entails.

• I went to see some local bands at Substation. This is the sort of thing I was waiting to do with someone else who seemed interested, but I discovered it’s a great thing to do alone (compared to going out to eat alone which I find unbearable). I saw Heavy Bloom, Hard Maybe, and Biddadat. They were all friends, so they played with each other a lot. Good vibes.

• On the way to work on Monday, I saw a guy walk into a pole while looking at his phone.

• I got caught in a short hailstorm. Always nice to remember that’s a thing that can happen.

• At chess on Monday, I played one game because it was so full. The guy I played with asked if I would have been interested in playing a variant on my phone where teams voted on moves. I said that sounded ok as long as I could leave and play a real game when a board opened up. He said that ChessVote was a project he was working on. Then he mentioned it was approval voting, and I tried to make some small talk about the recent Washington referendum on approval vs ranked choice to which he replied that he volunteered for the approval voting side. It was very surreal to be part of a conversation where one person knew exactly what was going to happen next.

• Valentine’s day fell on a discount Tuesday this year which made me realize that it’s one of the few days where you can feel lonelier going out than staying in. Everyone else in my theater watching Avatar was either in a couple or a group of three girls. This was one of the only times in the week when I questioned my own judgment. It’s not like me to go to a blockbuster alone, but I reminded myself that, at over 3 hours, it was a very easy way to stay away from home. And I only regretted it for the first hour!

It was a very successful if tiring game (I underestimated how much walking it would involve). I’m disinclined to do it again soon, but I do plane to change some things. I’ll probably start coming in to work more (2-3 times/week) and go to substation or other small live music venues. I did much less reading than I would have liked (if only the libraries were open later), and it was convenient that I had just finished watching Money Heist because I would have put that on pause. But otherwise, it didn’t feel too out of the ordinary. I did a good job of mixing up activities (active and relaxed, social and solo, etc).

I’ve long since come to terms with the fact that every organization system breaks down under a low enough mood. Everything on my todo list, no matter how SMART the goal or how actionable the action item, takes some effort to actually do, and when that energy won’t come, no amount of process will change the fact. I’d never before thought much of the reverse. It’s entirely plausible to me that I manufactured all of this to deal with some low-level mania. I’m reminded of Trick Mirror: “I can feel the tug of my deep and recurring suspicion that anything I might think about myself must be, somehow, necessarily wrong.”