A Quiet Life

"I guess you get to a certain age and you realise, that nothing exciting is ever going to happen to you, and maybe that's just the way it is, maybe some people just have quiet lives" 
- Virginia Lewis (The 10th Kingdom)

For some people there is no greater aspiration than to simply live a quiet life.  There is the hyperbolic dream of living in a cabin in the middle of the woods in the middle of nowhere with everything you ever need just there, or living on an island in the middle of the ocean on your own never having to deal with anyone or anything.  There is a ring of truth behind that hyperbole however, that is, if you truly want to live a quiet life, you need to be as far away or as far removed from other people as you can be, because in life, other people make it complicated.

I've mentioned before how I experienced a trauma when I was younger, which I'm not ready to write about in depth on here.  Suffice to say it left me distrustful of other people and fundamentally shifted my personality from one of extroversion and an extremely social nature where I could speak to anyone about anything, to becoming an extreme introvert where I spoke only when spoken to and of as little as I could.  The time I spent in high school was self imposed isolation.  After everything that happened to me I wanted to be as far removed from other people as I could be.  It worked to an extent, I got to live in my own little world but even at that, my bubble was often burst by other people, my personal space invaded, and as you can imagine that had a very negative impact on me as a person.

It wasn't until several years later when I was at college that I was able to slowly come out of my shell.  Introducing new people into my life until I gained the confidence to actually interact with others on a social level.  University for me came after college and was akin to having learned how to swim in a kids pool, being suddenly thrown off a diving board.  In that situation you have only two choices, sink or swim, and by virtue of the fact that humans float, even if you try to swim with little success, you'll still rise to the top, you just have to keep yourself there once you do.  University was very much this experience for me, I was plunged into the deep end from day one and I had to try and swim to the top.  I made it in the end but the experience left me panicked and I did partially retreat for a while, to the shallow end where I could still interact with others but not with the depth that you're supposed to.

To this day I am somewhere in between to the two ends of the pool, not quite shallow but not quite deep enough to dive all the way down.  This is rather ironic when you consider the fact I can't actually swim in the literal sense, again even more ironic since the reason for that too was a trauma when younger - an experience where I almost drowned in the county river, that too still leaves me reluctant to try to swim for real for the same reasons as my metaphor, my emotions and my thought processes stop me from trying out of a paralysing fear.  The only time I diverge from that paralysis is when I have no other choice but to try to survive.

There remains the temptation to isolate myself to live alone and engage with no-one.  On one of my old blogs about my personal life I wrote a post where I discussed the fact that the internet more than anything else enables the worst behaviours in us as human beings.  The fact you can actually live a life where you literally never leave the house is quite scary for me, because of how easily I could succumb to that temptation.  Every time something negative happens to me involving other people that temptation to check out and leave humanity behind becomes so impending that I have to battle to pull myself back and convince myself I shouldn't do it.  I don't know how many more times I can fight that battle and continue to win in the end.  I've lost that battle a few times and it's not been good for me physically, mentally, or emotionally.

How do you draw the line between living quietly, and living in isolation to avoid the noise?  I still haven't figured this one out.