Visiting Me

"Once in a while you have to take a break and visit yourself ." - Audrey Giorgi

I always considered myself a "people person". Being a loner-type was not an attractive quality to me. I thought that my happiest environment was to be surrounded by a multitude of friends or family or even people I didn't know--any living body would do, every waking moment of the day. I eagerly accepted party invitations, would show up at events even if I didn't know another soul and would quickly mingle with the crowd and make new acquaintances. I felt that I needed human interaction pretty much on a constant basis.

Once I had kids, I began to crave something different. Quiet, solitude and time outs became a staple of my daily time diet. Days where I had constant company, sweet little voices waking me up in the morning, accompanying me to the toilet, helping me grab the mail, contributing to my telephone conversations, clicking the "Reply" button over my shoulder while I checked email, rifling through the colored fliers before I had a chance to glance through the newspaper began to take a toll on me. I found that if I didn't have at least one short segment of time to be totally alone, even if it was just a trip down to the gas station to grab an extra gallon of milk, I'd get ugly.

In reflecting on this change of personality preference, I think I found the explanation. I made the comment once to Hero Guy that he took his free time for granted--a quiet lunch eaten at his desk, a 10-minute ride to work twice a day in which he was totally alone, an opportunity to use the bathroom without an audience. He looked at me as if I were crazy, stating that he eats his lunch at his desk when he is totally overwhelmed, they really don't have Take Your Child To Work option at his office, and he certainly isn't going to invite his boss along on his bathroom breaks. It's the perfect example of not appreciating things until we don't have them. I realized that when I loved being around people all the time, I also had more than enough alone time and then some to spare.

But I know too, that these days are numbered. Way too soon, I'll be back in the mode of wanting to be sociable all the time, looking for lunch dates, always chatting on the phone - but that will just be the symptom of the problem. I'll be missing those little people who think that I'm the life of the party.