Social Isolationism can make you crazy.

The world we live in is imperfect at best, and a cataclysmic train ride to hell at worst. Just when you think things are starting to go your way, something happens to bring your life crashing down around your feet in broken bits of whatever’s left when your expectation doesn’t match your outcome.

And if you want a fast track to crazy, just go into social isolation for a few months.

I’m not a social butterfly. I never have been, thank God. I love my own company and can go without other people for long periods of time. But not forever.

Humans aren’t designed to live their lives alone. We need connections.

When the normal is snatched away from you, the “new normal” takes its place. NOT the one everyone is predicting, but the real one. The crazy one.

At first everyone was content with taking care of things that needed to be taken care of. I did a little of that. Cleaned up some stuff, threw away some stuff, boxed up some stuff, gave away some stuff. I did home repairs. Cleaned out a shed. I burned a lot of things when we were able to (there was a burn ban in our state for a while).

I burned some things that didn’t need to be burned just because I like destroying things sometimes.

After a while, I ran out of things to do.

I ran out of things to write about to, or I couldn’t think of much. My mind seemed a bit blank.

A blank mind is a dangerous thing.

Granted, it could be said there’s a little insanity in each one of us. Some more than others. But when you take a person away from everything that is “normal” and into forced isolation, the potential for crazy dramatically increases.

Thoughts creep in. Suspicious, paranoid thoughts.

You have nothing else to do anyway, so may as well entertain those thoughts for a while. Maybe check into them, see if you can validate them in some way. Maybe by using social media, the devil’s playground.

Sleep is an odd thing as well. If you aren’t parented by your job on when to sleep and when to get up, there’s no reason for a regular schedule. You can even do your cyber stalking in the middle of the night if you want to.

You’d be surprised how fast the crazy sets in.

Psychology Today calls solitary confinement torture. It leads to all kinds of symptoms, including anxiety and paranoia. It may seem extreme to compare our bout of social isolationism to solitary confinement, but I don’t think it is. It would be especially daunting to someone who already has issues with trauma, loss, and anxiety.

You know, people like me.

Being socially isolated causes loneliness and depression also. We’re able to get out more now, and that’s a huge relief, but there are some people who are never able to get out much.

A large percentage of our population are shut ins. We have the elderly, and the mentally and physically disabled. People in hospitals, hospice, and nursing homes.

Maybe your mother, father, or grandparents.

People who are too poor to afford to go anywhere.

Going a little crazy for a bit has helped me see things from more than one perspective, and I’m grateful for it.

I see that I need to reach out to people more and stop doing without people for long periods of time, even when I’m not forced to.

I also reached out to my ex-husband and asked for his forgiveness. Not because I crashed and burned our relationship. That was him. It was more because I could see the other side of the fence, and how he had to live with me choosing to give my attention to all kinds of things, and not realizing he needed more from me.

I kind of see why his thoughts went all haywire. When you feel isolated, you’ll do stuff you wouldn’t ordinarily do.  

Good comes from everything if you know where to look.

Even slipping off the deep end.