personality typing

Gary has a point

Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but in these trying times the same could be said of loneliness. Hermitage, in the age of COVID-19, is as much a symbol of purity as a tidy home and sanitized hands.

Suddenly everything has a category and a rule. What’s the difference between social distancing and self-isolation? How small is a small gathering? On Twitter the astrological-Myers-Briggs personality typing discourse explodes. We hardly went out before, praised the sweet relief of cancelled plans, yet with restriction comes desperation. Unsurprisingly, everyone under quarantine thinks they’re really an extrovert at heart. 


But if I’m to imagine worldwide disaster solely from the perspective of my social life, it doesn’t seem so bad.

I FaceTime friends I rarely call while frying frozen pierogis and cleaning my room for the third time. Gone is the weekly rotation of dinners and cocktails I can't afford, in which we all look at our phones anyway, and leave a little poorer and minimally more secure in our relationships. My roommate and I watched a movie together for the first time on Thursday. We consolidated all our plants in the living room, like a mini botanical garden. I threw out the old chicken in my fridge.

As existential anxiety spirals, and social contact diminishes, I feel revived by the rediscovery of life outside the productivity metric. Isolation offers new methods of intimacy and care. I spritz the plants every morning while cycling through phone calls from everyone I know. I'm even more hyper-aware of my friends and loved ones, where they're located, what they're up to, when we can talk later today. Socializing is more democratic, hinging on concern and communication instead of money, clout, the Insta-story. We sit in our rooms and talk. My roommate introduces her coworkers to our plants by video. Group chats explode with lengthy confessions and new inside jokes. I’ve been listening to my neighbor sing the entire soundtrack to Wicked (really well if I’m honest, even the high notes) and feeling aware, for once, of all the living going on. I start playing Sia on max volume.

Both my roommates head for home in the night, leaving me with a single, priceless bottle of hand sanitizer.

I’m alone, so I don’t know what time to go to bed.

There is a bloggy trick people do where they hide their fears inside snarky essays, insecurity masked with sarcasm and so on. I guess this is a strategy derived from real life. But I only get nervous when the sun goes down and I check the news. The rest of the day I am weirdly optimistic for my group chat “nyc quarantine team :).” We schedule another FaceTime for tomorrow.

To put another bloggy spin on it, I can’t help but think that the combination of isolation and paranoia resurrects an old standard of internet life, in which friendships are deepened by distance and new personas bloom from the comfort of our couches. In our concern for each other we yearn for more social interaction than we’ve had in months.

Omegle is about to make a major comeback, as is blogging, phone calls, Skype, Club Penguin, paragraph texts, social e-mail, sitting on the floor, Tumblr, making your bed, Sims 3, LiveJournal, "internet friends," the app store, reading on paper, all caps HAHAHAs, sweatpants, AIM instant messaging, chat roulette, fan fiction, daytime television. Remember the days of starting a movie at the same time as your best friend, so you could text in real time as you watched? Or was that just me in 2013?

When we finally emerge, a little more self-sufficient, a little more secure in our best friendships, our outfits will be stunning, a chance to finally be seen, like returning from the summer after eighth grade with highlights and boobs. Not that that happened to me, but I like to imagine.