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Day 47 on which I discover that I'm totally screwed



So it turns out, at least according to this book I’m reading and a new longitudinal study about risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease that the keys to a long, healthy and compos mentis life are diet (check), exercise (check), and creating and maintaining close social relationships (dup doh).

At this moment, there are about 5 people in my life who, if they died or decided not to hang with me anymore, would leave me more or less without a “social circle”. Which is apparently something that I need for my own long-term health and happiness.


That number has been as low as 2 in the past. TWO. A canoeing accident could take out a circle that size. 2 can't even make a circle. Only a line.

And if living long and sane means that I have to go out and replace them, I’m just going to die young and drooling.

Are there no old, fit, happy introverts? Is there no way around this? Living with a lot of dogs, maybe? Because, honestly, even at the ripe old age of 39, I have NO idea how this friendship thing works. Heck, I have no idea how this PEOPLE things works. Since I was a child, they’ve utterly confounded me: I don’t understand why they act the way they do, at all. So when someone I think is a friend suddenly pulls my ponytail and then runs off giggling with the other girls, or tells half the people I know the one thing I asked him not to tell them, or…more recent stuff that’s still too ouchy to look at, all I can really do is decide that I was wrong, and we weren’t friends after all, and move on. And that’s happened a lot, and been painfully memorable each time, and makes me more and more hesitant to think of people as friends, rather than acquaintances or colleagues.

I’m a bit of an oddball. I don’t really click with a lot of people. I have no kids. I’m not close to my family. If my longevity is dependent on having a lot of close social relationships, I might never see 40.

I’ve never thought of my introversion as a deficiency before. With few exceptions, I haven’t “missed” having a bunch of people to hang out with all the time. And now I find it that it’s going to kill me? Not fair.

Perhaps, as was suggested by one of my Facebook friends, all of us introverts can get together in a sort of “anti-social social club” and unite for the common cause of staving off dementia and premature death. Because otherwise, I’m screwed.

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