I-Land is where memories and experiences turn into short stories, personal journal entries and narration in first person, part memoir, part fiction, exploring topics such as the relation between humans and the societies they live in.

Introverts, Lockdowns, And The Sanctity Of Private Space

When introverts say they were made for the lockdown and that the lockdown suits them and that they wish the world would stay in lockdown forever, take it with a pinch of salt. Introverts who stay/work from home love it partly because they get to enjoy the world in a different manner than everyone else. If everyone is quarantined at home, a certain charm of being secluded and self-sufficient is lost.

What’s more, part of enjoying one’s privacy comes from having the option to go out, should one choose to. Remove that option, and the introversion and home operations become a sentence, a diktat, something imposed from the outside. Introverts stay at home because they don’t like impositions, meaning that the lockdown defeats the purpose.

So when introverts say they love the lockdown, they’re mostly putting on a show, a front, a brave face to hide the fact that their world is collapsing and they have nowhere to go — that their sanctuary and haven is losing its value. Forced to stay inside, they experience their private space as they experienced the outside world, in a manner that throws them for a loop.

It’s a breach they can’t handle, a corruption they hate, and which they’re all too glad to reverse at the first opportunity. As soon as the lockdown is lifted, out they go, as enthusiastic as the most extreme extrovert, only to remind themselves how much they don’t like being out there. A while later they return to their home sanctuaries, happy to let the rest of the world go about its noisy, messy, convoluted business while they reconnect with the sanctity of their private space in the manner it was meant to be experienced — privately and by choice.