Illustration by Dola Sun
My 15-year-old daughter catches my eye in the bleachers at the varsity basketball game. She’s on the floor cheering, and I’m sitting alone and away from the crowd. My hair hangs long over my ears—my attempt to cover that I’m wearing my AirPods, listening to a book as I clap for three-pointers and watch her tumble. She knows, though, and shoots me her Why are you so weird? look. It’s a fair question.
At halftime, she finds me in the stands and asks what I’m listening to. A novel, I tell her. “That tracks,” she says. I don’t say that it’s a smutty, filthy romance story with pulsing this and that, which I would definitely not want to accidentally be broadcast over the gym’s loudspeaker. To be fair, I actually listen to all kinds of books in the bleachers. It’s my way to hide in plain sight, to settle any nervous body language I may have and keep me from dangerous looks left or right that might spark someone to speak to me. Which would require small talk.
I’ve always been a bit of a weirdo who highly favors her own company and tries to disappear in crowds. I am a writer, after all. A textbook introvert. A person who has worked for herself for almost 25 years. But lately I’m beginning to think I’ve turned into a character from a quirky Fredrik Backman novel—an eccentric old lady withdrawing from society after some inciting incident. Except I don’t have an inciting incident. I’m just done with people. Done. With. People.
(To all the people who know me and talk regularly to me, Not you. You’re great! I’m talking about everyone else. And if you’re my client, you should probably just stop reading now, because this doesn’t apply to you—definitely not the section about pointless meetings for the sake of meetings. Really. Your meetings are as snappy and elegantly paced as an Aaron Sorkin script. Thank you for feeding my family! Stop reading.)
I ran my first marathon, the 2001 Flying Pig, with my sister Laura. Our parents came to cheer us at the finish line. I remember the agony of those last miles and the joy of being done with the torture. But the thing I remember most is my mom, wringing her hands, looking at us with a kind of despair as we wrapped mylar blankets around our half-dead bodies and tried to stay standing long enough to get a picture. “It’s just so hard, I can’t imagine,” she said. She couldn’t bear the thought of running 26 miles. Her brain just couldn’t do it. “Oh,” she kept saying. “Oh!” I found it hilarious at the time. Now it’s how I feel about people. I just can’t.
How am I done with people? In the words of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, let me count the ways. I am done with people to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach. (Theory: Liz really wanted to write Sonnet 43 about being done with people, but love was selling better.) I am done with people because they have too many questions, like How are you? or the dreaded Are you doing anything fun this weekend? followed up on Monday with Did you have a good weekend?
These questions should be stricken in every language, punishable by broken fingernails and ice cream headaches and forced trips to the BMV. No one should ever be allowed to inquire about either my hopes for the weekend or if I had a “good” weekend. There are no honest answers any more, and the ones that are closest to honest—“Well, I laid in bed for hours Saturday morning feeling sick about the state of the world, floods, wars, and people being murdered, but on the plus side we didn’t have to deal with either the emergency room or the police, so yeah the weekend was as good as it gets”—are not what anyone wants to hear.
I’m done with people when they have suggestions. This is an especially hard one, since I have built my life on writing articles full of suggestions and pretending like I am an expert in a great many things. “Oh, you have an arrhythmia? Well, you know the treatment for that is ablation. I’ve written 12 articles about it, let me tell you all about it.”
I am as guilty as they come with having suggestions. But now I see the light. Suggestion’s close cousin, advice, is an even worse player in the game, because it pretends to be all humble, all shucks and golly and I know you’re not really asking but I’m just a simple, salt of the earth thing when really it’s a blood-sucking judgment machine. I know this because all that unsolicited advice I’ve given over the years always came with the unsaid, I do the thing we’re talking about better than you.
I’m done with people and their effusive displays of pride in their children’s many accomplishments, their family’s matching holiday pajamas, and their ability to take a picture of the Northern Lights that their naked eye never saw but their iPhone camera created. Look at my pink sky! Look at my senior who has been accepted to every college in the country! I’m well aware of the Mel Robbins advice to “let them,” but I think we’ve established how I feel about people’s advice. Yes, you have intuited correctly that I’m not actually talking about the fake Northern Lights; it’s about having a kiddo who graduated from high school in a much different way from everyone else around me. Let’s move on.
In no particular order, I’m also done with parents who scream from the stands at sports referees (um, I can’t hear my book when you do that); husbands when they say, But it’s only 8 o’clock on a Saturday night, do we have to go home already?; political candidates when they send their desperate fund-raising texts and I want them to win and make the madness stop, except life is really expensive lately. I’m done with outrage and indignation that “nobody wants to parent anymore” when a kid is spotted on a bike or scooter not wearing a helmet. I’m done with people telling me to have a “blessed day.” Sometimes, I’m even a little bit done with my cat, because we’ve been working on it for months and she still won’t ring a bell for treats the way those cats on Instagram do.
I’ve saved the best for last, the most egregious thing about people: They have meetings. Team meetings. Board meetings. Stand-up meetings. Weekly meetings. Kick-off meetings. Pre-kick-off meetings. Meetings to plan later meetings. Meetings to reflect on the meetings already held.
These meetings come with invites that fling wet mud into my e-mail inbox. Google Meet. Zoom. Teams. Sometimes you have to type in a series of slanty letters that were drawn by a drunk person to even be admitted to the meeting.
Once in the meeting, there might be icebreakers. For the record, I would like to keep the ice intact. I would like to skate alone and enjoy the ice’s smooth, gleaming surface. But, no, we have to introduce ourselves.
It’s equally bad when the meeting starts like a Greek drama, in the middle, and you have absolutely no idea what’s going on. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I don’t even need to be there. Still, I put on my serious eyes and agree Yes, what a big problem we have to solve. The answer is always the same: I will take the weird shit you’ve put on your website and write sentences that make sense. But if I said that, the meeting would be over too soon. I must prove my worth. I must use phrases like Let’s get into it and We should circle back on that and We can take that offline, all the while plotting how I can be permanently offline.
If I were truly a character in a wacky Swedish novel, I would grow increasingly idiosyncratic before stumbling upon a weird little cadre of people who would eventually come to need me as much as I needed them, and there would be a happy ending. I consider this as I fish a $10 bill from my wallet to give to my daughter for the concession stand. “Thanks, Mommy,” she says, hugging me in a cloud of perfume.
Across the gym, I see the teacher who almost single-handedly got my son through his senior year, and I give her a nod of gratitude. On the way back from the bathroom, I run into a good friend of mine and we plan a walk for later.
Soon, the game has started again and these kids are all teamwork. I sigh. It’s so annoying when people aren’t annoying. But I can be done with them tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow I will really be done.
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