Blog post: Rachel Cohen's "A Chance Meeting: American Encounters" is a wonderful book offering vignettes of meetings between individuals who helped to shape American culture. Mark Twain and Willa Cather, William James and Gertrude Stein, and others. The conversations are interesting in themselves; they also have me thinking about how encounters with people and books have shaped the person I've become.
@neurovagrant I agree that one important aspect of my #NeuroDifference I always strongly connected to was needing private space and time to process/recover, especially from social situations. I previously thought this was about #introversion but I now consider it very differently.
Taking away my private space and time has serious detrimental effects on my #MentalHealth. I noticed this most acutely during #COVID#isolation.
I don’t have social anxiety; I just need downtime to recharge after an outing. It’s a pretty simple ratio—for every one hour spent at a party, I need to have some quiet time for two to three
I try to time my arrival at the office not to be early, nor to be late, but rather to arrive at the precise moment at which I will not have to walk with anyone from the parking structure to the elevator.
I think #introversion is one of the most disrespected conditions. Absolutely no one ever feels any remorse about talking to random strangers, but it always feels like I've been assaulted when they do. I can't even complain about it because "people are just being friendly".
My counter-critique of anti-smartphone screeds of recent years: If you feel like our devices are isolating us from each other, maybe the real problem is that you aren’t as interesting as my phone.