Extroverts Guide through Isolation – Get in Touch with Your Introvert Side

Advice on how to survive the quarantine written by an Introvert for her Extrovert Friends

Dear Extrovert,

My friend, first let me say that I know this is hard for you.  But I have some advice that might help you get through all the social isolation.

I feel that the key to surviving life in general is to not feel trapped by it.  So, as we are all forced to stay home and feeling a bit trapped, we have to find ways to liberate ourselves. 

Make staying in your choice.

The first step is to make staying in your choice.  Open your door, poke your head out and find a reason you don’t want to go outside after all.  Lean out your door, and before the sense of longing for the outside world can set in, tell yourself “I’d have to put on pants to go out, I think I’ll stay in today.”  Or perhaps it’s raining outside and really looks miserable.  Tell yourself that staying in with a cup of tea is the most preferable option. 

Now that we come to that Give Yourself Options.

Having options is one of the things we miss most about being stuck indoors against our will.  Find several occupations/projects/activities for yourself and then decide not to do some of them, this way you don’t feel you are doing any one thing because there are literally no other choices.  Sometimes coming up with really terrible chores is the best way forward.  I could work on scouring the entire bathroom, or I could watch this movie.  It might make you feel better. 

You may not be able to go out and see friends, but you can still connect with them.  Not only are there a variety of ways to video chat, you can also call or even write a letter.  Maybe it’s time to sit down and tell your friends how much they mean to you.  Find different ways to check in so you don’t feel like there’s no option and no way to be social.  Even for your video chats, have a dance party together, or have dinner together, or have an art class together.

Do Silly Things Without Fear of Judgement.

Turn up the music real loud and listen to that one song you love over and over again.  Or add a little humor to your normal mix and sing Staying Alive really loudly to yourself in your pajamas (they now pass for day wear).  Sing along at the top of your lungs even if you can’t sing. 

You can dance around your house in a combination of outfits you would never wear outside and feel free in the knowledge that nobody will see it or judge you.  Don’t be limited by comfort (though do indulge in that as well), wear everything neon or froofy you can find together.  Wear a ballgown to your own solo movie premiere.  Because, why shouldn’t you?  If you’re feeling bold you can send photos or videos to your friends and encourage them to do the same.

Escape the Here and Now

No really, there's a reason we all love to consume media, social or otherwise, it's the escapism.  

There’s a million ways to escape reality for a bit.  Try a few of them.  Read a book that’s got nothing to do with today or your normal daily life.  Watch a movie you’ve been meaning to get around to for ages.  

Join a silly online challenge, like wearing pillows as dresses for quarantine couture.  Or even join a silly facebook group such as “A group where we all pretend to be ants.”  Find something unusual you’ve never done and revel in the novelty of it from the comfort of your couch.  You can share it with all your friends online too.

Tons of places are offering new ways to be involved online.  Concerts and Broadway shows are being made available.  You can call up a friend and watch one together.  You could take an art class.  The other day I went to an art class via a Zoom meeting and did a paint along acrylic painting.

 

Start a Big Project (Or Finish One)

If you are at all like the rest of us, you probably have three major projects you’ve been meaning to do for the last 5-10 years and never have time for.  

Guess what?  Now is the time!

For my family it is hanging up fake tin wallpaper on our ceilings to look like a Victorian tin ceiling.  It’s going to take ages, but luckily, we have lots of time.  

There is time to take online classes to learn that language you always been wanting to learn.  You can start writing that novel you’ve always put off.  Learn knitting or finish a cross stitch.  

Finish any number of little projects that got shuffled into a corner with the advent of more pressing things.

Start painting more like you’ve been meaning to for years.  Start doing a journal or writing if you’ve been meaning to get around to that.

Find a Way to Be Helpful.

Last of all, find a way to give back to your community as you are kept safe by first responders and essential workers.  If you aren’t at risk, you could volunteer to drive for a local food bank or volunteer there in general.  You could bring groceries to neighbors.  If you are at risk, find other ways to be useful from home.  You could just be there as a listening ear for friends having a rough time.  You can get social time in and feel more connected while you help.  If you can sew and have fabric, make masks for neighbors and friends, or donate them to the local food bank or to first responders.

Keep in mind that you are doing your part, reminding yourself of this as you go crazy on your own feeling cooped up will help make it bearable.  You’re staying in precisely because YOU DO CARE about people.

Love,

Your Introvert Friend

P.S. If it all gets to be too much, it is still ok to run around your house crazily shouting for no reason.  Honestly, we will all understand.

Evidence Proves that Stay at Home IS WORKING!

The World is more connected than ever, so it's no surprise that as the Coronavirus spreads we are watching each other struggle, sicken, cry, and come together to fight the virus online.  We watch videos of New Yorkers meeting from their rooftops and balconies and Italians singing across their squares to each other.

We stay at home and the isolation is a burden to us.  We feel alone and we have no evidence that our efforts are working as we hear growing cases and death tolls on the evening news.  But it IS WORKING.  Staying home is working.

Kinsa Health has developed internet-connected thermometers through which they can track the growth rate of new fevers.  They can show you, days in advance of when the hospitals become overwhelmed by the new cases, just how fast or slow the fever rate is growing.  And Stay at Home is a success!  It's the best news we can possibly have.

We stay at home and wait fearfully thinking our efforts are not enough to save ourselves, our neighbors, our loved ones, our communities.  But it's not so.  The efforts are working.  Shutting schools, bars and restaurants has dropped the infection rate.  The growth rate of new fevers is dropping.  In San Diego County and even in LA where the concern was mounting ever faster, the growth of fever rates has dropped roughly 8%.

Health Weather Map - fevers plotted per county

Staying at home has not only stopped the growth rate it is dropping it!  We are making a difference.  We are saving lives.

Manhattan is a great example.  According to an article in the New York Times about the restrictions and fever rates, the fever readings are predicting the hospitalization rates faster than anyone else can make predictions.  This is because people start to get a fever days before they require hospital care.  And the CDC gets data from the hospital and doctors.  So these fever readings from the internet-connected Kinsa Health thermometers are giving us data two to three weeks before the CDC can.  This is huge.  In the same article the data from the thermometers has shown how fast the restrictions on people's movements can start making an impact:
"
For example, in Manhattan, reports of fevers steadily rose during early March, despite a declaration of emergency on March 7 and an order on March 12 that public gatherings be restricted to less than 500 people.

The turning point began on March 16, the day schools were closed. Bars and restaurants were closed the next day, and a stay-at-home order took effect on March 20. By March 23, new fevers in Manhattan were below their March 1 levels.

Last Friday, New York State’s own data showed the same trend that Kinsa’s fever readings had spotted five days earlier.

“People say these requirements — no restaurants, no nonessential workers — are burdensome,” he said. “And they are burdensome. But they are effective, and they are necessary. The evidence suggests that they have slowed our hospitalizations, and that is everything.”
"
- From the article in the New York Times Restrictions Are Slowing Coronavirus Infections, New Data Suggest

This is the most hopeful, and informative thing I've read in quite some time.

If you are feeling like your efforts aren't working, think again.  Evidence is being collected that our efforts are really making a difference.  We will make it through this.  Staying home started to curb the rate of infection in only three days in Manhattan.  We still have a long way to go, but we will get there.  Slowly, we will.  There is hope and with the evidence of the decline in new fevers with Stay at Home directives there is a lot more hope than before.

And if you are interested in watching the progress of new fevers declining with our Stay at Home orders, you can watch this Health Weather Map created by Kinsa Health.

Stay at Home.  Stay safe.  And keeping helping where you can.

Little Things that Surprise me Most during this Covid-19 Outbreak: Elastic Shortage and Pigeons

Everywhere you look the world has changed.  It almost feels weird when you find an aspect of your life that hasn't.  Almost nobody goes to work anymore, working from home and trying to find unique ways to do your job or keep up with your friends is now the norm.  Schools are doing distance learning.  People are cooped up indoors.  All over the world there are empty squares and streets.  And little things that nobody ever thought of are now big.  And somehow the big things we all worried about three weeks ago seem small.

My mother and I were both feeling a bit like we were useless trapped inside.  But now we are coordinating through the phone and email with a neighbor who runs a local food bank in need of masks.  Mom and I are now busily looking up patterns and sewing fabric masks to help volunteers hand out food to the people who need it.  The numbers showing up at this local food bank have swelled from 160 a day to 400.

People have lost jobs and income.  People are in need and frightened.  And we are all doing our best.  Making masks from home with scraps of fabric piled in the attic.  There is an elastic shortage.  We used all of ours and now there seems to be none anywhere.  People across the country trying to sew masks to help first-responders are using hair ties and headbands for elastic.  An elastic shortage.  I would never have guessed.

And it's the little things that keep surprising me.  I saw a post on Instagram of the pigeons in Spain flocking to the only person on the street.  Nobody is out so they have no food to scavenge.  I have never felt sorry for pigeons the way I did when I saw them desperately following this lone human, begging for food.

A small piece of my heart broke for them.  Not even the pigeons, a seeming constant in every city, are unaffected by the global pandemic that is bringing our world to a halt.

Everywhere I look I find another thing that surprises me about the way our world has changed.  It makes sense, the way that streets being empty brings the wild animals out into the cities.  But it doesn't make the world any less surprising as every day seems to bring tiny revelations of our newly altered world.

We are all doing our best.  Fashion houses in NYC as well as individuals with sewing machines are churning out masks.  We know they aren't as good as N95 and surgical masks, but they're all we have now.  And we are doing all we can.  The fact that everyone is coming together, online, through tutorials on YouTube and through Facebook's Covid-19 Support page Community Help is a bright ray of hope.

The news is now almost entirely fact driven informative pieces relaying the situation on the ground to those who need to know.  I don't see the judgemental and hateful partisan things I once did.  Legitimate problems, calls for aid, and the way that people are trying to lift one another up are in the news now.  And for the first time in years I read the news with hope.  Hope that I'll find real information.  Hope that I'll find answers to questions I have.  Hope that I'll see humanity fighting it's hardest to become better.  Because faced with a global crisis we are more than ever all connected even as we sit in our houses all alone.

Stay home.  Stay well.  Stay connected.  Continue hoping and helping.