The extroverts have arrived and taken a wrecking ball to my solitude

Zoom beers, endless memes on WhatsApp groups and messages from people you haven’t heard from in months – Christine Manby doesn’t mean to be antisocial but she’ll be glad when the needy can go out again

Illustration by Tom Ford

For 25 years I’ve lived an introvert’s dream. My work as a writer means I don’t have to leave my house to go into an office. Looking back over the past quarter century, I’ve averaged just four or five face-to-face meetings with editors and agents each year. These days even “book tours” are done almost entirely online. Some might consider a writer’s life to be lonely, but for me the lack of day-to-day, face-to-face interaction is one of the best things about it.

So, when talk of self-isolation first entered the national lexicon, I had no fear of the concept whatsoever. I laughed along with fellow writers (the introverted ones at least) who declared they’d been self-isolating for ages and wouldn’t have it any other way. Even as the word lockdown started to be bandied about with more regularity, I wasn’t too worried. As long as I could still go out for a long walk each day, my life really wouldn’t change much at all. But I’d reckoned without the rest of the world getting locked down alongside me.

On Monday 23 March, while up and down the United Kingdom people reacted in horror as they felt their lives shrink to fit within their four walls, I was experiencing a slightly different kind of oppression. Suddenly it felt as though someone had set about the walls of my carefully constructed quiet life with a wrecking ball. The extroverts were coming.

In pre-Covid times, I’d get just a handful of emails and messages a day. In the weekend before Boris Johnson’s big announcement, my inbox had already silted up with hundreds of “how we’re dealing with Covid-19” messages from online boutiques I’d forgotten I ever used and from companies I wrote one feature for back in 2008 (interestingly, none of the latter suggested paying freelancers promptly as part of their new strategy to keep everyone safe and well). So far, so impersonal. It was about to get much worse.

In the course of that miserable Monday evening, after Johnson finally told us we all had to stay home, I was added to seven new WhatsApp groups. Soon I was getting an alert every 15 seconds as the new groups’ members popped up to say “hi” or post another pointless Covid-19 meme.

“Have you seen this one?”

“Only seven times in the last three minutes.”

Suffice to say, I was getting absolutely nothing useful done as I batted away a barrage of pointless GIFs and voice recordings of “someone’s friend who knows someone’s friend who once sat beside a nurse on a bus”, talking about how to defeat Covid-19 by wearing a clove of garlic in your shoe while sipping a tincture of dock leaves and dog pee. (I just made that up. Do not try it.)

I also wasted an enormous amount of time muting anyone who posted a “we’re all in this together” style IGTV video from their enormous country garden. I had no idea how many of my impoverished London friends were in fact scions of landed gentry. (As a side note, I think those of us who didn’t flee to the country on Monday 23 March should be given a “real Londoner” medal that entitles us to jump ahead of anyone who did flee in any sort of queue from now on. Ditto for all other big cities.)

I’m maintaining the relationships that are meaningful to me. I’m still calling the people I’ve always called. Just not on Facetime if I can help it

But the WhatsApp groups and Insta platitudes were nothing compared to the flurry of random email invitations suggesting I might want to get together with various people for a virtual coffee morning or cocktail hour on Zoom. Acquaintances I hadn’t seen in the flesh for decades suddenly wanted me to watch them down a large gin over a sketchy video link. “How are you, hon? Let’s catch up,” they said, though I doubt they would have recognised me if they passed me in the street. In fact, I know for certain one of them wouldn’t, having walked straight past me in the street just a month ago. Back in the olden days. It was clear that certain people who thrive on attention were issuing invitations to everyone in their email contacts in the hope of maintaining their supply.

Then, horror of horrors, someone actually suggested we have a virtual dinner party followed by games. Just the word has me triggered. The only party game I ever enjoyed as a child was “Dead Lions” because it involved precisely zero interaction and no noise.

So how does an introvert remain happily introverted and focussed when, in the spot-on words of @fawcettErika on Twitter, “isolated extrovert friends need a lot of attention... like they suddenly became Tamagotchi.”

There is, of course, an app for everything. I downloaded the Freedom App to make sure that if I couldn’t control the volume of messages and notifications I was getting, I could at least choose when to receive them. Meanwhile, I muted the WhatsApp groups I hadn’t wanted to join in the first place. I know I could have left them but, alas, leaving a WhatsApp group undetected is impossible, thanks to the automated message announcing any defection. There’s no digital equivalent of climbing out of a bathroom window on WhatsApp, though by Friday of the first week, some of the groups I was added to that mad Monday had already spawned smaller, breakaway groups – the equivalent of sneaking out of the party for a fag and a quick bitch.

For an introvert, too much social interaction – even virtual social interaction – can make them feel like a child who’s been allowed to eat too much sugar

When it came to invitations to Facetime over a homemade frothy mocaccino, where the person making the request wasn’t someone I’ve seen in real life since 1999, I claimed my tech wasn’t up to the challenge. “See you for a real coffee when all this is finished!” I suggested instead, knowing that will never happen. They’ll be back to walking past me in the street again.

I’m sure that some of you – those of you who have been logging into Zoom for a game of “wink murder” over a quarantini (Berocca and vodka) every evening – think I’m a terrible curmudgeon. Maybe I am. But while an extravert’s mental health relies on constant stimulation, my mental health relies on the very opposite. One popular theory is that introverts and extraverts have different levels of sensitivity to dopamine. Extraverts are less sensitive to the “happy hormone”, hence their need for the social interactions that cause dopamine levels to rise. For an introvert, however, too much social interaction – even virtual social interaction – can make them feel like a child who’s been allowed to eat too much sugar. You know how that turns out.

It’s not that I don’t want to connect at all. There is one particular group of writers I will be joining for a Zoom coffee – if I can get it to work – and I’m always delighted to see new messages on the WhatsApp group comprising my oldest girlfriends. Otherwise, I’m maintaining the relationships that are meaningful to me. I’m still calling the people I’ve always called. Just not on Facetime if I can help it.

To be honest, I find video calls seem to amplify the distance somehow. Saying “goodbye” to people at the end of a video call is oddly upsetting in a way that finishing an old-school audio call isn’t. Making someone’s face disappear with a click, when you’re missing them terribly, seems horribly final. Neither do I want to worry my loved ones by having them see me looking tired, or sad, or still wearing my pyjamas at lunchtime.

So, dear extroverts, please don’t be offended if I don’t invite you into my shell during this testing time for everyone. Let’s all make the most of this opportunity to more deeply connect with the people we’ll still find the time for when this strange moment is finally over.