And what would it mean if I was?

Those of you who only know me through my online persona might find the question baffling, or even amusing. Online, I am perky and funny and friendly to everyone. Me, antisocial?

But those who know the real me might at least get a glimmer of what I am talking about. In real life, I am a semi-recluse (or as I like to say, an “urban hermit”) who doesn’t exactly go out and paint the town red.

In fact, I barely paint one room light pink, and that’s only on New Year’s.

And it is easy to simply write it all off as agoraphobia and/or social anxiety and/or depression. (Complicated, but easy.) But as I ride that long dark road to recovery, I am beginning to wonder how much of that is, well…. me!

Maybe I am just not that friendly a fellow in the real world. The Internet is great for someone with the kind of social anxiety I have because it reduces the social stimulation down to pretty much its theoretical minimum. Talking in text, and through the mask of a persona that I created myself, reduces interaction intensity to the very low level that I can manage.

So I can be very friendly and silly and funny in that extremely low stimulation level environment. Mostly mental, takes place in the imagination (more or less), don’t have to be my real self and thus self-loathing is neatly dodged. It’s ideal.

And terrible, because it means I don’t have to learn to deal with reality.

My anxiety is so strong that it is very hard to me to figure out who I would be without it. I can’t see through it. It’s like this hyper dense magnetic field that distorts everything, even light, and makes my world blurry and unfocused.

Yeah, I know. My metaphors are weird.

But I am fairly sure that, if it all went away and my brain chemicals were normal and I could begin to think like a normal person, I would still not exactly be super outgoing or interested in “partying”.

Don’t get me wrong. I have been to parties and quite enjoyed myself, especially after drinking enough to keep the social anxiety at bay. I don’t have anything against parties or party attendance or people who love parties.

But to me, “partying” will always consist of finding someplace comfortable to sit and talking with people. Party animal I am not. And I am not very interested in small talk. I do it when necessary, and I grasp why it exists, but I am the sort of person who prefers to get right to the point without any unnecessary detours, so speaking of banal and inconsequential things bores me.

That is not exactly a pro-social sentiment.

See, the reason I have the terms pro-social and antisocial (that’s just how they are spelled, folks) burned deep into my mind is that I grew up in the era of pro-social kids’ cartoons.

In the late Seventies, moral crusaders managed to convince the FCC and the networks that the previous kind of cartoons taught all the wrong lessons, and cartoons and other children’s programming had to be “pro-social” as a result.

Usually, this was done by making the cartoons somewhat preachy, and led to the proliferation of “lesson” shows, where every episode had a moral lesson to teach.

Luckily, for most of it, I was too young to find that really fucking annoying. In fact, for most of that period, I found all those lessons soothing and in some cases even instructive. I came to expect them, and I can only assume that if I had come across something without an implicit moral, I would have been confused and possibly even angry.

In short, I was thoroughly indoctrinated.

In essence, these lessons boiled down to five main lessons, listed here in order of use.

1. Cooperation. It is always better to cooperate with others and do things together than to go it alone or fight with others. This is still, to me, a core lesson of what it is to be a human being. Cooperation is our strongest advantage.

2. Tolerance. This was most often formulated as “it’s okay to be different”. Another basic lesson of humanity, made more important with every increase in diversity.

3. Friendship. For some reason, they felt the need to keep telling us how awesome friendship was. I am pretty sure that you either know this firsthand or resent having it rubbed in your face.

4. Forethought. Think before you act. Don’t act purely on emotion. Use your head!

5. Safety. Don’t do dangerous things. Often connected to the previous lesson. My gosh, did I get a lot of safety lessons as a kid. I can’t entirely dismiss the idea that this made me the anxious adult I am now.

At the same time as I was having my mind marinated in universally acceptable moral lessons, the word “antisocial” became attached to the bad sort of person. Good people were pro-social. Cooperation and tolerance and so on. Bad people did bad things that hurt other people and made it hard to get along with one another.

So to me, to be antisocial is to be a bad person. But that’s a problem for someone like me. The whole vibe of the pro-social movement was not kind to introverts. And while you would think the whole “it’s okay to be different” message would be comforting to an oddball outcast like I was, but reality just didn’t match. As for forethought and safety, those came naturally to me.

I was never the kind of kid who did stupid stuff and got hurt.

As for cooperation, well, I was willing. The world was not.

And yet still, I would hate to be seen as antisocial. Part of me, I suspect, is still trying its hardest to live up to those excellent ideals instilled in me as a kid, and the fact that I don’t seem to be able to do it makes me feel like I am a bad person. An antisocial person.

Maybe I needed more episodes with the lesson “it’s okay to keep to yourself sometimes, too. ”

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.