Social Fatigue: Is it the pandemic?

One thing that has really been on my mind lately is my lack of social energy or as I have mentioned in the title, social fatigue. I mean this in the fact that I am that person who has to be in the right frame of mind to answer back to engage with messages and conservation. I rarely engage in conversations myself and I am the epitome of the will answer in 30 seconds or 28 days meme. 

There is no in-between.

I will just say it. It is the one thing that I really dislike about myself because I generally feel like an awful human being most of the time and that I am being a bad person and a bad friend. 

I always say to myself whenever someone messages me that I am going to reply straight away and this is finally the time. 

But something always happens. 

I'm working. I don't feel up to it. I generally forget. The possibility feels endless but those are the main ones. 

As I have tried to fix it, I have often wondered what it is about me that makes it happen. There seems to be too many reasons for these two and looking through my social media accounts, I don't seem to be the only one with this problem. 

So I just want to talk about it because if this helps someone else then I've done my blog right. 

So one of the first reasons is that I have social anxiety and talking to people, in general, makes me so scared. On some occasions, I literally want to scream if I have said something wrong or hit my head multiple times to make it stop. (My head was going in a different direction but I stopped myself.) 

So you can see why it takes me so long because thinking that I have said the wrong thing is massive and I feel like I am going to wreck everything. I don't but it makes me feel bad. Even the late replying makes me think the same thing and that I have destroyed everything. 

The second thing is that I know I am an introvert. An introvert who works in a front-facing fast-food position where I can speak to between 100 and 300 people a day. As you can imagine the last thing that I want to do when I get home is socially active. I like everyone who I am friends with but I do need quiet time and tend to watch TV or read but sometimes that is hard. 

Don't get me wrong I have tried but I do find it hard. I am also disabled and often do just want to sleep after I have finished a 9 to 5/5.30. I just have no energy left and try to do the bare minimum e.g. reading or watching TV. 

As you can imagine all of this one it's own is a lot but this is failing to mention that we are currently in a pandemic. (You have probably read the title but let's be real who forgot.) It is here that mental health is being spoken about. Because I am not the only one who is struggling. 

When I have thought about this idea, I don't think it is coincident that I started exploring this idea in my head in the last year. I had always been bad at starting messages but replying to them is different. This is a change. 

Being away from people, I do think that the pandemic has had an impact. I am not speaking to people outside of work, I'm often with customers and am by myself. I have lost how to communicate with people. Including in digital form. And I think that a lot of others are finding it hard to. 

Because if you are alone or if you are with family, you are comfortable. Lockdown One was the best mentally I have felt in a long time. And do you know why? Because I wasn't pushing myself socially. My social bubble became smaller and to break out of was difficult. As I am finding out now.

When people think about mental health is the pandemic, I think they imagine people worrying about money and businesses closing but it is having other impacts that you are only just touching the surface of. 

As it kind of feels like we are coming out of the tunnel, maybe soon will find what the real impacts are. Because I think they run deeper than we could ever know. 

See you soon, 

Amy