World's First Genderqueer WAG

This is not to blame you if you're not getting all of these types of interactions on a regular basis! I'm autistic but don't have social anxiety, so I know what it is to struggle socially but not what it's like to be terrified of interacting with people. And I have chronic health issues that significantly limit how often I can leave my home, which makes it much harder for me to interact with a wide variety people IRL on a regular basis, but I know that folks who are fully homebound or bedbound have an even harder time. And I'm sure there are other relevant life circumstances I'm not thinking of.

So I'm not trying to blame you if you don't have close friends, or if you almost never have meaningful interactions you aren't already close to, or whatever. This isn't about judgment.

This is an observation: when I go weeks only interacting with my partner, my best friend, and my parents, I become overly sensitive, self-absorbed, and deeply unpleasant to be around. I think constantly about my own problems and take deep offense when other people aren't thinking as much about me and my needs and preferences as I am. I feel terrible, and no matter how much love the people closest to me pour into me, it doesn't feel like enough.

And then I go somewhere where I have to interact with strangers and/or acquaintances (I go to synagogue, or I see a play where I sort of know one of the actors and we chat after the show, or I go to my neighborhood block party and meet people who live near me but who I've never spoken to before), and because going on and on about my problems and getting offended at everything anyone else says would be wildly inappropriate behavior for the context, I have to do something other than that, and it resets my brain a bit.

The details of this might be specific to me, but I think most of us have trouble being at our best when we only interact with the same few people for days or weeks on end. I've heard stay-at-home parents talk about versions of this, as well as elderly people who no longer work and no longer drive.

I don't think there's one universal amount of human interaction or variety that everyone needs, but I do think almost everyone needs to interact with more than a handful of people at least semi-regularly or they're going to start putting too much pressure on their main relationships and also losing perspective in general.

When you're going through a rough time, I think even more so than at other times, I think it's helpful to have a balance of interactions where you can and do talk about it, and interactions where that's not a factor (not in the sense of "I can't tell this person about my problems because they ARE the problem," but in the sense of "the appropriate type of interaction for this situation is pleasant chit-chat, so I'm going to try to give pleasantness and hopefully also receive it").

I remember saying to a former partner once that I wished I had more weak ties, though I couldn't really articulate why at the time. I think it's that weak ties are actually what creates a sense of belonging to a place. Running into someone at the new coffee shop, sitting next to a neighbor on the bus, going to a yard sale where it turns out you and the person have some mutual friends...that's the kind of thing that makes you feel like you belong, if not to a community, then to a loose social network of people who live in a place. And the sense of belonging fuels a desire to engage in prosocial behavior to support the network.