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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