IN MY MIND: On Being a Person
Being a person is hard, right?
I've been seeing a therapist again – highly recommended – and the biggest things we talk about are executive dysfunction and how I struggle to relate to and communicate with other people. This past weekend the Edinburgh International Improv Festival took place and for four days my city was suddenly filled with a whole bunch of improvisers I either knew quite well, had half-met online, or were just straight up strangers to me. The actual shows, coaching and jams I was involved in or got to watch were great, despite the constant stress of doing anything on this scale – or, y'know, at all – while we're still living through a global pandemic. But the social side of it was hard. I'm struggling to put into words exactly how hard, which is probably why I'm writing this. Just trying to get it out of my head and into a form I can begin to unpack, I guess? Could be because I didn't have therapy this week yet? Maybe I'll just keep it to myself? If you're reading this, I didn't.
I struggle a lot with when to correctly use terms like neurotypical and neurodivergent, especially with applying them to myself. I have long term overlapping diagnoses of obsessive compulsive disorder, generalised anxiety disorder, panic disorder and social anxiety disorder mixed with a dawning realisation that I might – and my therapist would say probably do – also have undiagnosed ADHD. You'd think that'd be enough for me to give myself a break about my social skills and maybe admit that there's some wiring stuff in my brain that I'm not completely in control of, but I'm not a doctor, so... I mean, my doctor is a doctor. And my psychiatrist was a doctor. And my therapist isn't a doctor, but she's definitely significantly more informed than I am...
See what I mean about struggling with putting this into words? Anyway, for four days I was in a situation where I was seeing so many people, with so many different levels of connection, after two years of barely seeing anyone in person and it was A LOT. I spent so much of the weekend swinging from so excited to be in a space with so much creativity and excitement for an artform I love, to being absolutely terrified and overwhelmed by the whole experience. On more than one occasion I just went to a quiet spot in the venue, put my noise-cancelling headphones one and just shut down for a few minutes. Desperately making time to process the sheer amount of social stimuli I was encountering. It kinda sorta worked. A bit.
I'm aware I'm not alone in being tired out by the past two years. Not, like, sleepy tired. Physically exhausted, emotionally hollowed out tired. In my first session with my new therapist I called it “soul-tired”. Like so many things throughout this global traumatic event, though, I'd almost got used to it. My energy levels and the number of spoons available to me have always fluctuated, so I just adapted to the baseline being even lower. The word “just” doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. We've slowly been able to get back to some semblance of work with our touring shows and I've been lucky enough to have long gaps between where I can rest and recuperate from the energy those take out of me. From the beginning of the year I got ill with some unexpected extreme vertigo and some very expected sinusitis and again I've been privileged enough to be able to take time to recover from those, too. I don't think I'd really thought about how exhausting being in such a unique social situation as an improv festival would be.
We were able to do one week of the Edinburgh Fringe in 2021, but with significantly more restrictions than we have now. I was able to see a few friends in one-on-one situations and it was all very lovely and manageable. Being in one or two spaces with so many people, with so many different kinds and intensities of relationships... Less manageable. I often struggle to connect to even my best friends socially in a way that doesn't leave me feeling worried and anxious that I've done something wrong and/or hurt someone or ruined something. Generally speaking the less I know someone, the bigger that worry and anxiety gets. I don't really understand the rules yet, unless I already know you. That kind of thing. Trying to learn or relearn the rules for so many people in such an intense timeframe was impossible and draining.
I'd stay close to my closer friends as a buffer, trying to position myself in rooms so I could filter how many people I'd talk to, occasionally getting the energy and courage to approach someone briefly, reacting when I could to people doing the same, kicking myself for missing the chance to to meet new people, squinting at people's masked faces to check if I recognised them from Zoom, racking my brain to remember if I'd met someone in some random part of the improv world six years earlier, forgetting to introduce people to each other like we do in polite society, desperately rambling on and on with some obscure trivia about improv or anything else, embarrassedly accepting or more likely deflecting compliments, hurriedly spilling out my own before scampering back to my corner... Then home for restless sleep filled with anxiety dreams and back to do it again the next day, inevitably sleeping in so much I'd run late for what I had planned.
That last paragraph makes it sound like a nightmare. Like I hated every second. But while it was exhausting and terrifying, it was also pretty great. It was hard, but so rewarding. It was terrifying, but so exciting. It was exhausting, but also invigorating?
My therapist and I are working on resources and strategies to help me with relating to people. Because people – on the whole – are pretty amazing. I was so blessed this weekend to meet, remeet or just spend time with so many amazing people, talk to them and see them do their thing! I would love to do that more! We're working on ways to make that less hard, less terrifying and less exhausting! I'm looking forward to it.
Being a person is hard, right? But it's also super worth it?