Staying home isn’t the only option
On a recent weekday late afternoon, it started to rain, hard, while I was walking the dogs. We hurried home; Savannah and Rikki got towel-dried and proceeded to cheerfully tussle over possession of a new Hollywood Feed plush toy they’d scored during the recent Barkus parade in downtown Little Rock.
Shaking raindrops off my GoreTex, I checked the weather app on my phone. Heavy rain was predicted throughout the evening. I don’t like driving at night, or in nasty weather. So my first thought was: Now I don’t have to go.
Why? My evening’s destination was the monthly gathering of my book club. I love getting together with these women, who are smart, educated, funny, good company, and able to contribute mightily to every discussion of each month’s topic (this month’s chosen read was Michelle Obama’s “The Light We Carry”), as well as wisecracks about the goings-on in their eclectic neighborhoods.
So why was my first inclination to feel relief at the idea of bailing out?
Covid has something to do with it. For many of us, our social lives came to a screeching halt when the virus hit (we quickly learned that a book club gathering on Zoom, although well-intentioned and ambitious, can’t replace the in-person version). After covid roared into our lives in March 2020, we slowly disentangled ourselves from social activities. We thought the shutdowns would last about two or three weeks. We had no way of knowing how long covid would interfere with our lives.
When many of us were encouraged to work from home, we gradually got accustomed to wearing yoga pants and sweatshirts, jeans and trainers; our closets containing business suits and dress shoes started to accumulate dust. So did our makeup bins, outside of a brief swipe of eyeliner and splat of mascara (eye makeup lasts a long time if you don’t use much of it).
Let’s not even start on bothering to blow-dry and style our hair; some of us haven’t visited a hairstylist for several years, preferring to use clips and stretchy hair bands to keep hair off our faces. Jewelry? Other than a sport watch, none; I leave the same simple post earrings on, right down to overnight, neglecting to switch them with others that complement what I’m wearing (yoga pants and sweatshirts).
“I think a lot of people are out of practice,” says Laura Sniderman, founder and CEO of Kinnd, a platform that helps people make friends. Maintaining relationships takes effort, as does putting on pants, earrings and getting out of the house. We gradually lost our ability to crank up the energy required to relocate to a place to see someone— especially when we’re out of practice at dressing decently and doing what my mother called “putting on her face.” That can increase the desire to just not do it at all.
It’s not unusual, Sniderman says, to look forward to seeing a friend in the morning, “but by the afternoon, our mood and energy levels have changed.” When those feelings take control, “we might want to cancel plans and spend our evenings watching Netflix or reading a good book.” We can deal with the guilt of being a loser friend the next day, when a new set of challenges is sure to present itself.
Clinical psychologist Miriam Kirmayer agrees that avoiding situations that stress us out only provides short-term relief and may actually be worse for us in the long run. Because of the pandemic, “We’ve all been very much in a forced state of avoidance, where we haven’t been able to do things,” she says. “So we’re seeing these increasing levels of anxiety, which then makes it harder to put ourselves out there, and we get trapped in this vicious cycle.”
In her opinion, the more you avoid something, the harder it becomes to actually follow through— and not following through can produce feelings of anxiety.
This particular evening eventually presented its own solution: My husband’s planned get-together with a friend got canceled at the last minute. So, along with having to cope with an unavoidable last-minute work complication, I chose to feel guilt-free regarding my decision to not attend book club. (We watched an episode of “Ripley,” an amazingly intense black and white mini-series streaming on Netflix).
I missed out on a homemade blueberry pie, girl power, and a discussion I know I would have enjoyed. Weather and work be damned; in the future, I’m determined to enjoy the opportunities that are open to me to commune with others. And regret it when I don’t.
Unless it’s raining.