Chapter Thirty-One: Nope, Not a People Person
I moved into a big house to be able to host a lot. It turns out I have stringent limits.
By the last few days of my mother and Linda’s visit, I was in bad shape. In between Charles and my sister, and then these two, I had had live-in guests for a little under two months with something like a week of down time in between. “Assed out” is le mot juste.
The senior ladies and I ended up taking it a lot easier on the sightseeing than my mother had wanted, so it’s not like my energy was flagging because we were running around so much. It’s just, when you are an introvert, and I am the very definition—a Meyers-Briggs INFJ if you want to get woo about it—the constant presence of other humans is tricky to navigate. This is true for me under any circumstances, but when said humans have come a long way to see me, and there isn’t a lot to do where I live, and they’re curious to see it, and I am responsible for their good time, I wonder if I shouldn’t just dig a hole down to the center of the earth. What I learned during the summer of 2021 was that this has nothing to do with the people in question. No, really: it’s not you, it’s me. Promise.
My raggedy mental state during the home stretch of the longest invitee-intensive of my life started out as a troubling reminder of the couple life I had just left. When my ex and I lived together, which we did for the last five years of our relationship, I was not at all graceful with his regular physical presence. I felt like there were prying eyes around me. That I had to hide all the ways I was flawed and sloppy and particular, and all my unhealthy habits, because it was all too shameful to throw at someone else’s feet. If I were imperfect, I would no longer be able to judge him for his own terrible habits. Mature.
I hid out in my office to get space from the very person I was supposed to love and want to be with and I couldn’t really grok that paradox in the moment. I didn’t know to just stake out space for myself without guilt because I was still trying to solve the obvious problem of US that my behavior must have been symptomatic of. I blamed myself a lot for the breakdown in intimacy between us, figuring that because we couldn’t solve our problems, and I couldn’t get more comfortable with him, and I knew I had rather large attachment issues anyway, that the whole shit show was just proof that I was bad girlfriend or wife material. Not cut out for life à deux. Never mind that he was as terrified of me as I was of him, as big an escapist as I was, and it always takes two to tango. And then there was his whole cheating thing. But no, I am woman, therefore it is my fault.
It especially fucked with me when the kids were on their twice monthly weeks at our place, because I assumed that as I hid out just to get some alone time, I came across to them like my father did with me. He had untreated depression and spent a lot of time shut up in his office off my parents’ bedroom, unwilling to exchange with anyone except by grunt. Being on the receiving end of that as a young kid was not cute. The message, as I received it, was that I was boring, or irritating, and he was too busy and important. So every time I went upstairs and closed the door when other people were around, I assumed they took it as the fuck you I grew up with even though it almost never was.
When it all went to shit with my ex, my first though was just that I was better made for digital or off-and-on or long distance relationships, even if I find them as unsatisfying as everyone else does. House Guest Summer made me see that the whole thing was probably a lot simpler. Everyone who visited was charming and helpful and, with some momentary exceptions, low key. They weren’t my ex and we didn’t have any weird couple problems. They were the people I grew up with, and who raised me. Charles has been one of my closest friends for more than 30 years. We have unspoken agreements about most things, and time flies with him. Linda I’ve known and loved since I was eight. My mother and I don’t have a relationship fraught with conflict, nor do my sister and I. And yet I was frequently clawing at the walls all the same.
This would have been well and good if we were in Paris, where there are ten million distractions for visitors without making them borrow my really wobbly and uncomfortable loaner rental car to go enjoy them. In Saint-Maxime, you better like whatever book you brought, or whatever is currently streaming, or walking in the forest, because there is fuck all else to do.
I took as many days off from work as I could during their visits, but still I did work through it. Shutting myself off in my office once again, every minute I spent away from them, I felt guilty about. Even as they easily accepted that I had to pay the bills, even as no one gave me any grief about not being 100% available, I had hours of time in that room while the others entertained themselves. But it didn’t really do the trick, either, because as I was also starting to realize, when I’m away from other people because I’m on the clock, I’m still being claimed by someone else, just not the people I am currently shutting out.
So, when I wasn’t cranking out copy on a deadline, I would sit there and ponder and brood, and it finally clicked that, really, none of this was personal. It wasn’t even with my father. And while it was certainly a quirk of mine, like it was of his, and I should be polite about it, it was also a fact of me that was as much a condition of my existence as my nose or my inability to digest large amounts of dairy.
I now see it as science: when I am in the same field mixing electrons with anyone else’s after a few days, no matter who they are, I become an asthmatic without her inhaler. At a certain point, I need to feel no outside human need or desire or expectation, no other conversation or flow of information or any other kind of exchange other than one I volunteer for and can shut down without offense. Maybe I should wear a t-shirt or hand out cards.
Just a couple days before Linda and my mother were meant to get on their plane home, I had a strange meltdown at the grocery store. I couldn’t answer another question, give another direction, make another decision, or have another exchange. I needed to go into silent boulder mode so badly that my executive function basically deserted me. The three of us were at the entrance to the football-field-sized supermarket in a fluorescent-lit hangar on the outskirts of Saint-Jouin. As I lifted out my little plastic caddy from its stack, I forgot what we were doing there, what I was supposed to do next, what was on our shopping list. My brain just went eerily blank, and yet at the same time I was addled and non-linear.
I told them what was up, hopefully not too brusquely. “I can’t make any more decisions right now,” I said. “I can’t answer any more questions. I can’t be in charge of anything. My brain is shutting down. You guys go find what you need on the shelves but I’m checking out.” And then I wandered the aisles alone like that Warner Brother’s baby chicken still encased in a half an egg. Probably I picked up some pre-made codfish fritters and some coconut rice milk out of habit. I have no idea.
When we got back home from that strange trip to the Twilight Zone, I handed Linda and my mother some framed vintage photos, and said that while I was lying down in my bedroom to clear my head, their job was to figure out the best places to hang them. My mother had brought over another objet as a house warming present: a carved wooden macaron stained very dark that looked to be 18th century. (Hopefully she will correct me if I am wrong.) It has her initials and a crown carved in, and was a gift from her former employer and dear friend, with big sentimental value. I wanted the moment we hung it to be sort of ceremonial and then at the end of the day, I outsourced it and ducked out. They hung it over the hutch where my range goes and it does look like it was meant to be there.
The photos in question are two framed, black and white industrial-looking panoramic snaps probably taken in the 1950s. One featured a steamer ship and the other an aerial shot of a factory. I found them 20 years ago or so in a Salvation Army on the outskirts of Kingston, NY on one of many weekend visits to my friend Catherine’s country house just outside of Woodstock. We’d drive up there with her aging Golden Retriever in the back of her station wagon, and we’d spend most of the day figuring out what to cook, procuring supplies, and then executing. She’d make fires, I’d dig through her massive pile of back issues of Harper’s, and make salted caramel ice cream from one of her Claudia Fleming cookbooks, and before we knew it, it would be time to get back to Manhattan. There was plenty of easy conversation, but there was also plenty of silence.
My mother and Linda found an excellent spot for the photos, on the wall perpendicular to the range. They were a solid visual reminder of my comparative hosting fail. The weekends at Catherine’s, way back before I moved to France, were a part of the fantasy feathered nest that Le Perche became for me while I was still counting down the months to getting out of my shared house with my ex. A sort of imaginary rural safe space, modeled on her house and how it was spending time with her in it.
Well, in my version of things, the custard base of the ice cream turns out to be not quite so smooth.
There are three morals to this story:
1) Nothing turns out like you think it will, but usually it turns out just fine if you manage to give yourself a break.
2) That €50k I spent to build myself a separate bedroom and bathroom in my attic, one floor up from where everyone else now sleeps, was the best money I ever spent.
3) Please don’t read this and feel like you have to tiptoe around if you come visit. I am actually learning how to modulate. But things will go better if we don’t speak until at least noon.
I relate so badly to needing time absolutely alone. INTJ here. I also find it hard to manage / titrate. Constantly feeling like I thought I could handle more time around others than I really can and somehow am not aware it’s too much until I realize it’s already become way too much!
Long visits are hard for many of us and some short ones can go badly, too. People take a lot of energy.