Social Captivity
When parties feel like traps
Maybe I’ve gotten weird with age but social commitments make me worry. As soon as I agree to something, I wonder if I’ll regret it. I imagine myself being at a party, or in a theater, or concert, or writer’s talk, or on a plane and a feeling of captivity takes over what should be pleasure. Trapped. Bored. Stuck.
It’s not just an imaginary fear either. I have many examples from my past. A vivid one happened when I was grieving and accepted an invitation to dinner at a couple’s house. I didn’t want to go but they’d been kind and helpful and it felt rude to decline. When I got there, I saw their house was full of couples, except for me. I was expecting dinner for three. Instead, there sat a bunch of people I didn’t know all staring pitifully at me. I was fifty minutes from home, and I could see my car through the window of the dining table. It took all my self-control not to bolt from the middle of the annoying conversation they were having. I remember being chastised by the hostess for wearing black, among other things. A lot was wrong and weird about that night but the main thing I remember is feeling trapped.
It was a familiar feeling. Drunk holidays with my ex’s family that went on for days with me staring at the clock. Tick-tock. More wine, please. It was how I got through. At bars listening to boring people I barely knew drone on with their captive audience. Sometimes I wonder if drunks drink in order to blunt the boredom caused by their fellow drunks.
Parties can be painful. Not all of them, but when they are, I start to think about how if I were home, I could write or read, or paint, or hang out with cats, or watch a good show, or any number of things that aren’t that exciting to most but are tantalizing to me because I have the freedom to choose on a whim. I am not captive at home. I can do what I want as it suits me, and this is not true of parties. I imagine if I just took the remote control at a hostess’s house and tuned in my favorite show, I probably wouldn’t be invited back. Maybe that’s worth remembering.
I’m not sure if I’ve had to tolerate an unusual number of boring situations where I felt trapped or whether I just have less patience, tolerance, and care now that I’m older. It probably seems like I hate people and that’s not true at all. I just want to choose when and where and how long we’re together, and I don’t want those choices obliterated by prior commitment.
I think of my cat when he was in the cage in front of the house after I’d finally trapped him for our move. He remained quiet but ran quickly from one end of the cage to the other, back and forth, again and again. Captive. That’s what social obligations can feel like sometimes. In the end, it was the start of a much better life for the cat. And I know being social under the right circumstances fills a need in me. But I can never be sure on the day of the event if I’ll regret having made the plan.
This is the dilemma of my aging mortal life: balancing the luxurious freedom of having absolutely no commitments against interacting with the rest of the society I was born into. Is it just me, some weird quirk from my past blown up to the point of intolerance? Or do we all feel this way? Extrovert vs. introvert? There are too many levels on that scale for all of us to feel the same. I know introverts who will never accept or enjoy a social invitation and that is not me.
When we don’t know others who struggle like us, we wonder if we’re experiencing something that needs repair. But I’m not sure this is repairable. And more importantly, I’m not sure I want to. Maybe I just want to swim farther out and see what it’s like to indulge my solitariness. Then I remember that life itself brings this to us all in time. A day will come when it’s too hard to get out, or all the people we would go see are gone. Maybe a time comes when we have nothing but our solitary existence. If I knew that was coming, I’d push myself more, make myself get out. And, in fact, I think that’s what I’m doing these days. It was a part of the plan to move to town life really. I just have to fight my instinct to stay where I’ve been the last twenty years: with nature in the freedom of my own mind. It’s a strange battle and I’m in it now. Like most things, I won’t know until much later how I’m doing with it. My moods, and feelings, and curiosities push me in the next best direction every step of the way, even if I go off course sometimes.
I’m glad to have you here following along, chiming in, and helping me make sense of this mortal life. I’ll be back next week. Until then, take care.
I'm definitely less social now than I used to be, and part of that is that I used to have a spouse as a social buffer when I went out. Now that I've been a widow for almost 15 years, I realize how much of a difference having a gregarious and charming spouse to take the brunt of the other-people-energy was! On introvert/extrovert, have you seen the book The Gift of Not Belonging by Rami Kaminski? He proposes a third personality type, otravert, those of us who enjoy others, but have no need to "belong" to social groups. I found the book and his research fascinating and very helpful. You might want to read it to see. Blessings and a hug to you!
I talked with a therapist for a brief time when I was 50. I was moving out of state to be near my children. She advised that as we age we tend to become more introverted and our social circle shrinks. That had already begun to happen.
Today, when I do socialize, it’s with my immediate family and only occasionally with a couple of friends. I no longer suffer from the dreaded FOMO of my youth and really value solitude!