I often say I don’t like people, which is not true at all. I love people—just certain ones whom I see at specific times of my choosing.
It’s not so much “not liking” the rest as it is a persistent, low-grade disappointment over how people ruin everything. The best example I can offer: in 2019, during a government shutdown-induced staffing shortage, visitors to Joshua Tree National Park decided to “create new roads” for off-roading and cut down a handful of trees that may have been older than our country. NBD.
In my dreams, I’m roaring at them:
IT’S A NATIONAL PARK, FOR CHRISSAKES! Why not just go take a piss on Stonehenge? Who hurt you? I guarantee it wasn’t a fucking Joshua Tree.
These folks have earned a spot on the list I keep for the day I become an evil billionaire with the means to shoot people into space.
Somehow, despite being the author of a list like this, quality time with others is my love language. Which sorta sounds like the opposite of being an introvert, if you define introvert as “a person who does not like people.” Which, incidentally, is not how Merriam-Webster defines it.1
And while Merriam-Webster is entitled to their opinion, I will continue to believe that mainlining quality time flies in the face of introversion—based entirely on my own admittedly extreme definition, which doesn’t even accurately apply to me.
I enjoy making memories. Bonding and laughing while imbibing intoxicants. Locking eyes across a table. Nodding along to stories I’ve heard a hundred times, then chiming in during the retelling. (See, I love people! Not an introvert.) I love these things so much that it’s perfectly reasonable, I think, for someone who chooses to be on their phone during this sacred communion to become the target of my unmitigated fury. (Oh, wait.)
In these moments, I disassociate. My mind stages an unhinged private opera wherein I emit a scream so piercing it’s pure sonic shrapnel. Mirrors and windows shatter. Dogs three neighborhoods over cover their ears. In the silence that follows, the perpetrator blinks bewilderingly, surrounded by glittering evidence of my desire to just catch up a bit, ya know?
In another version, I wordlessly pluck the phone from their hand and violently beat it to death. It is deeply, cathartically satisfying.
But the truth is, even though I like some people enough to entertain violent fantasies about destroying the things that get in the way of our hang time, I just don’t think I’m cut out for peopling. My body outright rejects it.
I first noticed this phenomenon back in High School. My face was a normally functioning face until the moment I arrived at school. The instant I saw a single person—even someone far away whom I didn’t know, making it a near-zero likelihood that we would have to interact in any way—my facial orifices would go into hyperdrive. My eyes would water like I was trapped in a sandstorm. My nose would run like an Ebola monkey’s. I would enter class, mopping my face with a ShamWow to avoid the dreaded raccoon eyes and just generally presenting as the human equivalent of a snail trail.
I told myself this happened because school started early, and it was brisk at that hour, which sometimes results in a purging of the facial orifices. But I grew up in Southern California, where it’s never really all that brisk, and the timing of the appearance of other people seemed far from coincidental.
Then in 2020, I started a podcast. Almost immediately, I became stricken with a chronically runny nose that would start at the beginning of an episode and utterly evaporate once it ended. I spoke to my doctor about it, and she told me that it was rhinitis and that, on a scale of one to real problems, this was a -10.
So I took matters into my own hands. I replaced my home’s air filter, which, it turns out, you should do every 3 to 6 months, rather than never because what’s an air filter?
I bought an air purifier, which is the simplest and fastest way to improve your health, said the guy on the podcast who sells thousand-dollar air purifiers, but if you act now, you can get one for the low, low price of $800. And if you’re wondering how I found my way to that particular podcast, the subject line of the email announcing it read: “Do you have a chronically runny nose?” To which I responded, “Here, take all my money.”
And still, whenever I meet someone live on Zoom, I end up wriggling my nose like a coked-up Samantha from Bewitched, in an effort not to wipe it with my fingers like a plebe.2 I have occasionally brought Kleenex to video interviews, though nothing says I’m really leaning into my crone years like a woman dabbing her nose on camera with a tissue. My mother-in-law keeps Kleenex in her bra, and this is not a rite of passage I’m ready to embrace.
For a time, before every interview, I would wad up little plugs of tissue and put one inside each nostril to staunch the flow. It worked remarkably well until it didn’t, and I had to write to my video editor and ask him to deal with it, “it” being a monstrous white booger that I’m sure he found very perplexing.
So, I think it’s fair to say that a leaking face is not exactly conducive to being around people, and that’s why we can’t hang out this weekend.
Or ever.