Every March, in a state of mild seasonal depression, I convince myself that winter will never end, that we’re doomed to endless Siberia. Yet every year I’m proven wrong, like some half-dumb fool who’s seen a movie a thousand times but can never remember how it ends.
I’m always shocked by the abundance, the fecundity, of late spring and summer. I walk outside after another night of bad sleep and am stunned when, instead of being nipped by a chill, I’m embraced by a wide warmth, like a grandparent I haven’t seen in years and didn’t realize how much I missed. I smile and close my eyes, and despite my innate aversion to earnestness, whisper: this is life!
Sometimes, happiness comes easy.
The thaw is complete, the isolation over, the procession of sicknesses ending, hopefully. It’s time to start seeing people again, in groups, outside. Remember people? Remember outside? The most demoralizing part about cold weather isn’t the cold itself, though freezing temperatures are objectively unpleasant, but the negative effect the cold has on us as social creatures, the way it causes us to fold into ourselves and say, to social engagements, what’s the point, or perhaps more commonly, especially for parents of young children: we can’t, everyone over here is sick.
I say this as a dyed-in-the-wool introvert: people wear me out, but it’s not their fault, and I still need to be in their presence from time-to-time to enjoy the pleasant brain chemicals released during social interaction. This is why I married an extrovert. I mostly like to be around people, but I don’t want to be the one who has to keep in touch with them, because my mind is always telling me they don’t like me, anyway (again, not their fault).
As Neil Young put it, “I need a crowd of people, but I can’t face ‘em day-to-day.” If our household was a government, my wife, Caitlin, would be head of the Department of Social Interaction: she maintains friendships and schedules engagements, and all I have to do is show up and reap the scientifically proven benefits of being around other people.
I think it was Sartre (I’m Googling and…yeah, it was Sartre) who said “hell is other people,” and it was definitely Bukowski, that wise old drunk I irrationally worshipped as a 20-something, who said “I don’t hate people, I just feel better when they’re not around.” These sentiments sometimes ring true, but study after study has shown that one of the most fundamental characteristics of a happy, fulfilling life is a strong sense of community. A foundational bedrock of other people strengthens us and makes us feel like we’re part of something greater than ourselves, and, in turn, gives us a sense of our place in the world. Having strong social ties also makes us healthier. Lack of human connection can cause increased levels of stress, inflammation, anxiety, and depression, and can also undermine our immune systems, which paves the way for any number of chronic ailments.
As an article in The New York Times put it:
In a study of 7,000 men and women in Alameda County, Calif., begun in 1965, Lisa F. Berkman and S. Leonard Syme found that “people who were disconnected from others were roughly three times more likely to die during the nine-year study than people with strong social ties,” John Robbins recounted in his marvelous book on health and longevity, “Healthy at 100.”
This major difference in survival occurred regardless of people’s age, gender, health practices or physical health status. In fact, the researchers found that “those with close social ties and unhealthful lifestyles (such as smoking, obesity and lack of exercise) actually lived longer than those with poor social ties but more healthful living habits,” Mr. Robbins wrote. However, he quickly added, “Needless to say, people with both healthful lifestyles and close social ties lived the longest of all.”
Even the most introverted among us are biologically social creatures. While occasional alone time is necessary to recharge our batteries, as it were, none of us can exist as islands for long. Why do you think solitary confinement is such unbearable torture? Because it removes people from the gaze of humanity and, in doing so, eliminates all external confirmations of their existence (i.e. a touch, a hug, or even a simple smile). We need people around to support us, to remind us who we are, to keep us from spiraling too deeply into our own troubled psyches.
***
As most 30-somethings will tell you, it’s hard to make friends as an adult. The majority of our peers are settled in their routines, and forging a place for yourself within those routines is a struggle, even for extroverts actively seeking new friends (see: my wife). Children, however, can be used as benevolent Trojan Horses to sneak behind the gates of friendship. Kids are basically miniature drunkards, and their lack of inhibition makes them natural icebreakers. They have no qualms about stumbling up to a stranger kid on the playground or at pre-school and, with a glob of gelatinous snot clinging to their upper lip, shouting “DO YOU LIKE GABBY’S DOLLHOUSE?!” If the other kid says yes, a friendship is born, at which point all we can do as parents is cross our fingers and hope we like the other kid’s parents.
Thankfully, we’ve met a lot of cool parents in Staunton. When we moved here two years ago from Western North Carolina, Caitlin and I, both Virginian natives, didn’t know a soul in the valley. We have family in Richmond and friends in Roanoke, but no ties whatsoever to Staunton. Those first few months were lonely, as we frantically tried to find a preschool for our son, Conley, who has a rare genetic disorder and, at the time, couldn’t walk or feed himself. Only one place would take him, and while it initially seemed like a great fit, they abruptly kicked him out after only a few weeks because they couldn’t handle his special needs.
That felt like the worst thing that could’ve happened, but in retrospect, it led us to a school that has accepted Conley wholeheartedly: Anna’s House, located on the campus of the Virginia School for the Deaf and Blind. He enrolled in the fall of 2023, and has been there ever since. We released our benevolent Trojan Horse behind those brick walls and he’s been busy forging friendships since the day he started.
Our cultivation of community in Staunton reached a high-water mark, of sorts, on Memorial Day weekend, when we hosted a birthday (for Caitlin)/housewarming party at our new home on the north side of the city. It was one of those rare gatherings that came together seamlessly and went off without a hitch. The weather, often mercurial this time of year, was brilliant: sunny and 67. Caitlin and I had the requisite marital freak-out the morning of, as we hastily cleaned the house so our friends and family wouldn’t judge us as irredeemable slobs, but once the people started filing in, with arms full of sides we’d asked them to bring, a sense of togetherness descended like a soft quilt.
I did my introvert thing in the kitchen, chopping chicken and veggies for the kebabs, refusing help partially because I’m stubborn but also because I like to be focused on a task that doesn’t require conversation. Two hours later, with 30ish friends and family members spread across our backyard, and a gaggle of laughing/crying kids hopping on the trampoline, the kebabs finally emerged from the oven. People ate and laughed and enjoyed each other’s company under the shade of the enormous maple tree in our backyard, its thick branches hanging ominously over half of our house, just waiting for one good storm to send them crashing down onto our roof. But there was no storm today, just shade, sun, good food and drink. And, of course, good people.
***
When Caitlin and I were in our late 20s, we spent what little money we had on a two-month road trip across the American West. That trip was, to this day, one of the defining moments of our lives. It gave us a chance to see all of these immaculate places we might never see again, or at least might not see for a very long time. It was, in essence, the last heaving gasp of our youth, as melodramatic as that sounds, and as we barreled through ephemeral areas like West Texas and White Sands and Yellowstone and the Oregon Coast, there was a strange urgency in the cab of our dented 2013 Prius, a sense that an era in our personal lives was ending, that whenever our wheels stopped rolling and the great adventure came to a close, we’d never be able to go back to who or where we were before it all started. At the end of the trip, I asked Caitlin to marry me in the backyard of her grandpa’s house in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and in doing so, bookended a certain way we’d been living until that point, and catalyzed a new kind of existence, the contours of which we’re still trying to define today.
I remember thinking, at the onset of that trip seven years ago, that being on the road for two months would ignite some nomadic urge within me that I’d never be able to quell; I thought that once I drank the Kool-Aid of an untethered existence, totally divorced from the workaday world, I’d never desire, or be able to talk myself into, returning to the shackles of a Leave it To Beaver lifestyle, as my 28-year-old self probably would’ve called it. This was, in a sense, true: the trip inspired me to see more of the world, to make adventure a priority, to never settle for a flat unmoving life, yada yada yada, but it also, curiously, had the exact opposite effect: it made me long for a sense of stability, of family, of community.
The last place I stayed on the road trip was an AirBnB in Oakland decorated like a sex dungeon. It had graphic pictures on the walls of skinless men urinating on women who were likewise skinless (California, amirite?). I was by myself because Caitlin had flown back to Virginia to be with a friend who’d suffered an unspeakable tragedy. It was late September and the evening was cool in that dense city by the bay. I sat cross-legged on the patio under solar-powered string lights and felt incredibly unmoored, unstable, and, above all else, lonesome.
I’d spent the past however many weeks traversing the western part of the country, searching for whatever the hell I was searching for, and what had I found? Myself, alone. Sure, I’d found excitement, too: I’d seen James Franco square-dancing in Santa Fe, steaming geysers in Yellowstone, and the snow-tipped peaks of Mount Rainier in Washington, but I felt no more fulfilled, no more myself, than I did when I set out. I didn’t know a single person in the city, or even the state, I was in, and that made me feel so insignificant I could’ve floated away with the fog rising off the water. What my soul needed was dependable simplicity: My own bed. A doctor who knew my name. A coffee shop where I was a regular. I was yearning, against all odds, for the predictable comforts of a domestic life.
A few nights later, I dreamed, or more accurately nightmared, that my friends and family were hacking off their arms and legs with rusty machetes in a wood-paneled living room, spurting dark blood all over the white shag carpeting. Naturally, I wrote about it:
Why are my family and friends hovering limbless in my unconscious? Maybe it’s because, in the back of my mind, I know I’ve been away from home for too long, that I’ve somehow lost touch with those closest to me. Maybe this trip, as exciting as it’s been, has had a tangible downside. Maybe it’s time to go home. Or at least somewhere closer to home.
I couldn’t have known it at the time, but the kind of life I was pining for on the patio of that weird Oakland sex dungeon was the exact scene at our house on Memorial Day weekend. It was, above all else, a feeling of contentment, a rich sense of fulfillment that I don’t think can be mined from a terminally transient lifestyle. Each mode of existence, the root and the wing, has its time and place, of course, and I still have the occasional urge to burn it all down and hit the road. But these are just fleeting fantasies, and what would I find out there, anyway, after the sense of novelty had worn off? Myself, alone, without a community to ground me, hugging my knees to my chest in some weird sex dungeon on the West Coast, wishing I could evaporate and be carried back to a place where people knew me better.
Michael Schoeffel is a writer, firefighter, husband, and father based in Staunton. You check out more of his work on his Substack and Ourland Mag. He can be reached at [email protected].
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