This past weekend, the Eagles won the Super Bowl. And I — a person who does not own a TV – was home the entire time. As I sat at my desk, I followed the game through the cheers I could hear erupting from the sidewalk, the bar down the street, my neighbors’ homes and updates my sister dropped during a quick catch-up call.
Two weeks ago, when it became clear my new city’s team were going to the Big Game, I briefly considered figuring out how to be somewhere in a crowd cheering the Birds on.
Briefly.
The truth is, I’m not a sports person. Never have been (but I love my Cards — L yeah!) but I am — I was? — a person who enjoyed being a fixture on the scene. Any scene. So whatever was the Big To-Do, I was To-Doing It (and typically with an open tab at the bar).
But some combination of aging and life “Post Pandemic” have made me crowd adverse. Mostly. While I wasn’t down to cram myself into a Philly bar at the height of fairly severe flu season, I did not hesitate in 2022 to hit up AWP Philly where us writers did everything but lick a bathroom floor (and subsequently, most of us left with COVID. Not me tho. I waited to come down with it a few months later in Portugal…).
So it’s not like I won’t venture out into a crowd ever, but the return on my time, energy and inconvenience must be great. At this age, I’m more into the things I’m into and less into the things I’m not — but still fairly open to trying out the things that are entirely new to me (I hope!). I hear this is also a facet of quitting drinking. Where alcohol was once a raft that could float you through a less than interesting evening, when you give it up there’s even less incentive to show up and attempt connection with people who can still use booze to get by on a boring night. If I can’t enjoy the outing stone-cold sober, I’m staying home, y’all.
Sometimes I wonder if this new state is actually a transformation or simply a returning to self. In my early 20s, I regularly ranked as an introvert on personality tests. At some point I transitioned from an INTJ to an ENTJ. It could be just as likely that getting a taste of adulthood allowed me to break out of my shell as it is that I looked around and saw the people who had want I wanted, who were seen how I wanted to be seen, and those people were the social butterflies among us.
In my mid-twenties, a friend and I answered a Craig’s List ad to be paid by a bar to be The Life of the Party — hot chicks having fun is good business. But that’s not exactly a role I’m still seeking to fulfill at 40. I continue to crave connection — I’m human after all! —and I still love a good mingle. But a satisfying social encounter is more likely to be a one-on-one hang these days or losing track of time tucked away in a small group at a much larger function.
I want to go deeper with people. So that means an end to spreading myself so thin socially. This is aided by living in a new city, although I did somehow run into three people I know at a play last Friday.
I was convinced that I would be the old lady on the dance floor. I vowed with one of my besties to never give up high heels and short skirts. To not let the youngins shame me for daring to be sixty and dressed skimpy in public. I was all for lending my gumption to an ageism revolution. But alas, I have gone the boring, predictable route and can hardly stand to be out past 10 PM, much less leaving my home at that hour.
But can I say, I really am amused by tracking and examining these changes. I find it endlessly fascinating the parts of us that we once considered a pillar of personality that aren’t actually central to how we construct our understanding of self. I’ll tell you I was a Party Girl, but maybe I was just a spark seeker and those sparks are now lit up in different ways in my life.
Gone are the days where that spark could only be had by grinding against a stranger in a dark club or admiring my own curves in the latest Forever 21 find. Now it looks more like this: the deep poring over a sentence with writer friends, the chat with a community builder trying something different, a cousin that entertains every woo-woo conversation I want to have, a pen-pal relationship with my niece. Spark. Spark. Spark.
