Why I can’t stay at a party for longer than half an hour

I can’t do dinners with many new faces. Or parties beyond half an hour or so, writes Nikki Gemmell.

I have a social affliction that has blighted my life but I am not alone; thanks to social media, particularly, I now know there are a lot of us out there. And it is OK. It is not a pathology, a problem, a mental illness or weakness – yet for years I thought it was. Introversion stares into the life I try to lead, and it will not let me go.

The symptom: well, after stepping into the world, we introverts need to retreat for quite some time. To recalibrate. Allow the world to wash off us. We have to charge ourselves regularly, like a phone; charge ourselves with solitude. This can take a few days because you feel rattled and mis-aligned after an excursion into the world and then have to right yourself with the medicine of solitude. I can’t do my own book launches anymore. Or school reunions. Or dinners with many new faces. Or parties beyond half an hour or so.

Yet you’d never know this from the public persona. I’ve trained myself since the excruciatingly shy teen years; forced myself to learn how to be in the world. The public persona is gregarious, confident, loud. Extroversion the mask. Few people know of the sleight of hand; those who do are treasured. It’s an act I now carry out with ease but it has taken decades to master. And afterwards I need the long, still, slow time to decompress. And oh, the bliss of cancelled plans, especially when it’s not me who’s done the cancelling.

Much of the world doesn’t get this charged urge to be alone, to lock yourself away, to dive deep into quiet time; “to make me visible”, as Emily Dickinson once wrote. I can only go out about once a week, anything more is exhausting. Two nights in a row almost impossible. I spend the time after an outing abuzz and don’t feel right until several days afterwards when I’ve decompressed. Yet there are contradictions. Feeling trapped in a room full of strangers yet wanting to be invited; just never wanting to stay for too long. Needing time away from people yet constantly psychoanalysing them – for motives, vulnerabilities, complexities, cruelties.

We introverts are not good with crammed proximity. There is a rich inner life. We are thinkers, will always be thinking, it’s chaos in there. It has taken me years to accept this strange state of being and live the way I want to – not how the world tells me to. We exist inside, not outside, and I was ashamed of this for much of my life; ashamed for feeling that something had been thieved from me if I existed too much in the glare and blare of a regular world.

If I went out too much I would feel bruised in my pysche, my head scrambled. Exhaustingly. Is this way of existing a curse? I used to think so. Now I see there’s an observational quietness to the preferred way of being, and I cleave to it. Introverts are the observers, listeners, noticers. There is a flinch from the superficial. The boastful and inauthentic.

Guy de Maupassant said it best: “There are two races on Earth. Those who need others, who are distracted, occupied and refreshed by others, who are worried, exhausted and unnerved by solitude as by the ascension of a terrible glacier or the crossing of a desert; and those, on the other hand, who are wearied, bored, embarrassed, utterly fatigued by others, while isolation calms them, and the detachment and imaginative activity of their minds bathes them in peace.”

I was bathed in peace during the Covid years. Those months of lockdown were a shy gift in a lifetime’s span. That wondrous pause in the mad rush of living was seized; I gulped the vivid days of retreat. Never felt more alive, present, observant; I say this guiltily, but life was experienced in high definition as the world slowed. As an introvert, it was my time. Should there be shame in admitting this?