People are irregular, inconsistent, and unreliable.
People are irregular, inconsistent, and unreliable. Such is life. People who are adequately fitted to the vagaries and visissitudes of social life will be irregular, inconsistent, and unreliable as a matter of course. I live at distance from social life and others in order to preserve a stable and secure space for myself. I need order, routine, predictability, and familiarity, for the very reason that I experience much of social life is confused and chaotic. This is particularly the case with respect to human beings. Most people are tuned into social life and its competing, often conflicting and contradictory demands. It is those demands that I seek to minimise as far as possible by reducing social interaction and exchange as far as I possibly can. I can go to great lengths to preserve a safe space around myself. I try to ration my time and energy when it comes to engagement with others. I try to let just a select few in, letting them know my needs and requirements when it comes to psychic and emotional health. Unfortunately, people being people, they upset and destabilize. Given their extensive connections and commitments with respect to an unpredictable social existence, how could they not.
But, yes, I go to extreme lengths to ensure that people understand my need for stability. It takes an immense psychic effort from me to commit to some social activity or event or another. I like people to mean what they say and walk the talk. But ‘events’ nearly always intervene to upset the best laid plans.
I can spend a week or more fretting over events and activities I have planned, commitments I have made, meetings I have arranged, psyching myself up for participation in what for me is challenging social activity. And at the last minute people message me to tell me that they cannot make it. My reaction in the first instance is a strange mix of frustration and relief, followed quickly by the return of anxiety in even more virulent form. Frustration because the plans which had congealed in my head have come to naught, wasting all that time and energy with worry; relief because in the immediate moment I don’t have to undergo the social ordeal; even worse anxiety because the ordeal has not been cancelled, merely postponed and I have to go through all this psychic preparation again, all the time anticipating another last minute change of plans. There is no mystery as to why I keep people at a distance, cut people out, and prefer to live in my own safe space, a world of my own in which I can impose order and maintain routine.
