Out of Juice

I run on battery power.

There’s a well of energy inside me, and right now, it’s charging. I’m in a familiar place, doing something I enjoy. Sitting on my couch with my computer, my battery is humming contentedly as its indicator changes from a red sliver to a full green cell.

There are a handful of circumstances that act as my charging stations. Visiting my parents and sitting at their kitchen table, for instance, or relaxing in their living room. Curling up in bed with R and watching Netflix. Staying with a close friend in Portland. Making a long car ride across the state by myself. Doing things I feel good at. In all of these situations, I plug into the cozy familiarity and let it fill my battery up.

I try to keep my battery as full as possible, because it’s a mess when I go into emergency shutdown mode.

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R and I were visiting Alaska two summers ago when I first recognized the battery inside me. That night, we were staying with the friend of a friend, who was temporarily housesitting a spacious, comfortable house.

Aided by good beer and whiskey, the four of us laughed as we got to know one another. Our host showed us a thought-provoking TED talk and told us about his work cutting trails. R and our friend M gushed excitedly about Beyoncé and Nicki. I wandered outside to take a picture in the eerie mid-morning sunlight of 10:45 pm.

And then, without warning, everything… changed. I didn’t want to hear M and R gushing about how utterly perfect Nicki and Queen Bey were. All the jokes and levity, which were ringing soundly with me only a moment ago, were suddenly falling dull and flat. Laughing–even smiling–was, for some reason I couldn’t fathom, impossibly difficult.

After sitting in this funk for 20 minutes or so, I finally excused myself and went to bed. By the morning, I was right as rain, if also completely thunderstruck by what had happened.

I hit upon the answer later as I was penning a letter: I had run out of energy.

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If familiarity charges my battery, then novelty wears it out. At least as far as I can tell. I’m still learning about this part of myself, and the answers I get are bothersomely inexact. What I’ve gleaned so far, however, is that adapting to new or unpredictable stimuli takes energy for me. A lot. And when I run out of that energy, many of my inner workings–my emotional flexibility, my ability to socialize, my engagement with my surroundings–shut down.

I’m an introvert, in other words. I don’t know if my experience is anything close to other introverts’, but from everything I’ve read about introversion, the definition fits. Whereas some people get charged up by going out and experiencing new things in unfamiliar circumstances, those experiences drain me.

Which isn’t to say I dislike them, or I can’t do them. If you know me, you know I am occasionally wild and gregarious or tirelessly social. I go to parties and stay up until 2 in the morning chatting with fascinating people about comics, Strong Bad, social justice, or the Kyoto train system. I’m not secretly gritting my teeth and wincing throughout those encounters–that is genuinely me, and I am genuinely enjoying myself. But maintaining the mental, emotional, and social flexibility required to roll with new and unfamiliar circumstances like that requires tapping into my battery, and there’s only so much I can do before needing to recharge.

Frustratingly, I can’t predict this except in the broadest of terms. My charge indicator is woefully imprecise and I never know quite how much energy a certain encounter will require; I can swing from the green to the red in only an hour or two, or I can spend a whole night at a party and still feel amped. Good conversation helps but small talk doesn’t. Doing things I feel good at, like mixing drinks or flirting, is a plus; making social gaffes is a big, big minus.[1]

Sometimes, I’m able to proactively take charge–to go into power saving mode, so to speak. When R was hosting a party in our apartment a few months ago, I pulled out a needle and thread and sat on my bed patching my jeans for an hour or two, dipping into conversation occasionally, but focusing most of my energy on something I could feel comfortable doing. This is one reason I love donning my vest and tie and being the designated party bartender: it allows me to escape to the quiet kitchen, focus on a skill I feel good at, and create something that adds to people’s experiences of the evening.

So I’m getting better at attending to my battery, but even still, there are times when it runs out and I shut down. Recently, I was out celebrating a friend’s birthday at a local bar. I was at a table with a bunch of my friends, and we were having a decent enough time, but the socialization was a little aimless and unfocused. We had to yell across the table, covered in empty glasses and trays, to be heard, and conversations were competing for attention with the flashing TV screens and the clack and felty rumble of billiards games. I bumbled and made R mad, and that was it. I was done.

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When my battery runs out, I stop being fun to be around.

It’s not an active decision, mind. I’m not trying to be a sourpuss or to piss people off. But without my permission, my cheeks turn to granite, and smiling takes energy I no longer have. Once, it hit me so hard and so unexpectedly that I grabbed my broom and began meticulously sweeping my kitchen because even answering simple questions without sounding like the Grumbling Terror Who Hates All Life had become an impossibility. Hiding in my kitchen, I swept and swept, eventually scouring a layer off my floor, because I didn’t want to ruin anyone’s evening and I knew I didn’t have the energy to be pleasant anymore. The best I could do was isolation.

Time slows to a crawl when I’m out of energy, and without the power to adapt to unforeseen circumstances, everything becomes a big deal. Scrape my shin getting into my car and not only will it hurt more, it will also set off a cascade of bitterness and self-critical thoughts. Of course I’d do that. What a careless mistake. Open a beer that wasn’t up for grabs and I’ll fret until I go home about how best to make it up to the host. Objectively, these troubles are minor at best, and under other circumstances, I’d laugh and roll with them, but with a dead battery inside, I lose that ability.[2] Every incident is a big deal, and the glacial passing of time grants me lifetimes of catastrophizing over them.

These days, I’m cognizant enough to recognize when I’m out of energy, which means despite my suddenly dour manner, I’m not grumpy at anyone but myself. It’s just impossibly difficult to convey that in any sort of convincing way when I first have to remember how to move my mouth so my speech is cheery and lighthearted instead of a monotonous drone.

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Please, if you’re a friend of mine reading this, understand a few key points.

First, being an introvert doesn’t mean I dislike hanging out with you! I can’t think of any social event I’ve voluntarily gone to in the last two years that I didn’t want to attend. It may have taken me a couple of decades, but I’ve gotten very good at spending my time with people I enjoy being with, doing things I’m interested in doing. My introversion just means that by the very nature of our activities, some things, even when I do them with people I love spending time with, will wear me out more than others.

Second, I’m usually pretty good about managing this stuff. I’m sharing it all in a blog post because it’s an interesting part of my life, not because I expect, or even want, anyone to suddenly change what they’re doing when I’m hanging out with them. You don’t need to do anything different. I’ve been learning how to take care of my battery for a year or so, and I’ll continue to manage it just fine. It’s my battery, after all, not anyone else’s.

Third, if I were to ask for anything, it’d just be that you be forgiving of my slip-ups. It’s pretty darn rare that I wear myself out when I’m around other people; normally, I’ll just excuse myself before I’m completely out of juice. But in the incredibly slim chance that I run myself into the ground and get cranky, or have to brusquely call an end to festivities, it would mean everything to me to know that you understand what’s going on and won’t hold it against me–at least not for too long. Ultimately, it’s my responsibility not to be a jerk, but it’s always great to know that even if I do get a little jerkish, it’s not the end of the world.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’m going to put on my slippers and make a mug of tea. I want to be fully recharged when I see my friends tonight.

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Footnotes

The new WordPress Gutenberg editor does not currently support footnotes. This is silly, but here we are. Here are my footnotes from this post, preserved awkwardly until I can reintegrate them more elegantly:

[1] Nothing drains me of social energy faster than making a blunder. Screwing up and making someone uncomfortable usually makes me want to immediately return to my home base and recharge. This, I expect, is one part introversion and about three parts my own insecurities and neuroses.

[2] Again, this may be an intersection of introversion and my own issues with insecurity and perfectionism.

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Credit to Philly’s charming comic about introversion for the “battery” metaphor.