To want to become a partial recluse - or is that odd ?

[awobabaobob]

Background: I'm 51, married, 3 teen DC, WFH full time.

I'm not agoraphobic (that I know of). Since lockdown, I enjoy and appreciate more and more time at home. I don't want to go out out - although I don't know if that's because I have put on weight/feel down/have realised that I'm starting to lose my looks/have anxiety looming over me for something else going on in my life right now which is longer term problem and a huge worry.

WIBU to want to just stay a home as much as I can ? I get food shopping delivered anyway. and always have done. I am not into clothes shopping and prefer to order on line. Lately, I find too many people too much eg. busy supermarkets and people dithering/walking so slow in the shop why they try to decide what to buy & people getting in my way annoy me. Lots of traffic on the road which makes me angry/cross/annoyed at taking soooo long to go anywhere & a 10 min journey turns into 30 mins. Queuing makes me annoyed. Shops being out of stock of what I want/need and my journey through the traffic and the busy shop has just been a waste of time. I just get soo frustrated with it all . Some examples:

Go to the shop during in advertised opening hours, to find the shop closed for lunch. There were no closed hours advertised in the day. Due to my own time constraints that day, I couldn't wait/go back for the shop when it re-opened. Journey to the shop was a waste of time.

Go to supermarket and join queue to pay. Told the queue is closing. I move to a different checkout, The one I was queuing at then re-opens and everyone at the back of my queue - who had only just joined my queue to pay - joins it.

Go to cash machine. 3 people in the queue - sigh - my turn and the machine has run out of cash. Other people in front of me have got cash out. Waste of time queuing.

Go to shop and pay using self-service checkout. It turns out that someone had already scanned 4 items at the check out I was using and then walked off/abandoned their shopping (but the shopping had been cleared away by the staff, although the till had not been cleared). I pay without realising, Notice the bill is £££. Check the receipt. Spot the error and then it takes another 20mins to refund/sort.

It's just all tooooo much

@Alphabet1spaghetti2

Whilst hormones can affect how we feel about things - are all those immediately jumping on the menopause wagon extroverts? Curious!
some of us are just naturally introverted and life is sometimes just too full of dealing with frankly twaty people.

You know extroverts also dislike dealing with twatty people, right?

Introverts don't have a monopoly on sensitivity or discomfort.

That's what I'm thinking too. I'm feeling like this too, and I'm going through perimenopause.

Although the annoyance of people and situations may be down the menopause, I do think your own personality dictates what you actually prefer.

People who have struggled all their lives to be more outgoing get to a certain age and actually have the confidence to be themselves. Maybe that's being intoverted or just really enjoying their own company, their own singular persuits, there is much to enjoy with ones own mind.

As much as extroverted people like to believe it is some devine purpose to be in constant interaction with others, some do not. I've found some of the outgoing folk going into older age seem to not to have a brake on the self absorbed pedal.
Pick the level of interaction that you choose and don't be guilty, the more outgoing will try to make you feel guilty or a failure because that is in their makeup to strive for attention.

Op, do what suits you, if you are not hurting anyone.

The menopause wagon? Have you been through it? Is it a wagon we all leap on in your opinion or is it something that can be debilitating to many women?

Introverts and extroverts suffer from the lack of oestrogen in equal measure. Some lucky women have no symptoms at all. They don't get symtoms of depression, anxiety, feelings of doom, a dead sort of feeling that nothing matters, no sense of joy. Those were symptoms of menopause I listed, not symptoms of being an introvert.

What hope do women have when a woman describes the menopause as a 'wagon'.

Yeah, I feel this a lot.

I wfh, so I dont need to go out. Sometimes I can enjoy it, but going into town is a distinct event now, whereas before I'd never give it a thought.

Supermarkets give me anxiety, I usually go in the middle of the night as I've got a 24h one near me.

However I've also been abroad a few times in the last year, and I didnt feel that at all there, I wanted to go out and do things all the time. Somehow without the comfort blanket of "home" I was much more energised to do stuff.

People who have struggled all their lives to be more outgoing get to a certain age and actually have the confidence to be themselves

This is me. I am menopausal but I don’t think that’s anything to do with it. I have worked out of the home for years, done all the socialising etc etc. But I never really enjoyed it.

Now I wfh, rarely go out socially, but I’m really happy. I’ve done gigs, meals out, theatre etc etc. I don’t miss it. Not at all. I see new things when I go on holidays, that’s enough for me. The rest of the time I would rather spend the money I would spend on going out on new craft stuff or whatever. That gives me far more enjoyment.

My sister is my polar opposite, she can’t stand being indoors and overall she is not happy. She doesn’t have the money to be constantly doing activities so goes on long walks alone or drives somewhere then sits in a car park with a coffee, anything other than be at home. She may well be a bit fitter than me from all the walking but she absolutely isn’t happier. Mental health is just as important as physical health.

Yes, I agree with you - this describes my MIL as above (her husband died suddenly and relatively young).

Whilst I do often understand the urge to retreat and stay at home, I think isolating yourself too much is very risky and I’m really trying to avoid it.

Really interesting post. A close knit hamlet is such a different thing to living as a recluse though. My grandparents' generation, even in a hamlet, would see the same shopkeepers each week, have the same milkman. If you wanted to send letters you'd likely need to converse with the post mistress at some point. Most people would end up living in the same street as people they went to school with, and run into them every time they went shopping. Think of Miss Marple - sleepy village life as a microcosm of humanity. It was hard to meet your basic needs like getting food, without some level of social interaction, so it was much harder to end up severing all your social connections. It doesn't sound appealing to me as an introvert at all 😁 I prefer the anonymity of a town.

I can understand this, but be very careful you don’t isolate yourself too much. We need to have some social/community activities & purpose. You may need friends & people who care when things in life go wrong.

If you don’t put anything into community & friends, you won’t get anything back.

This is all so true.

@Movinghouseatlast if you read my post - which clearly you cherry picked over - my menopause was 30 years ago! Plus I wasn’t saying it’s impossible for menopause /hormones to not have an effect on our moods - rather that not everything must be blamed on the menopause. (it’s a fact of life for women not a disease, it can be a dangerous route to over medicalise every state of life).
If people took the time to read the op, the way she felt about a wasted/frustrating trip out, wasn’t due to menopause- but really poor customer service, yet so many poster saying oh it must peri/menopause Argh!!! . Wish there was a pill/patch/cream that could fix poor customer service.

yes its odd, the only people i knew who didnt go out were housebound people and they could not.

Get out while you can maybe you wont be able to one day.

Its part of life living amongst others.

It's not just people that you can become fed up of. There's lots to the modern world that can irritate or grate on the nerves....sirens, roadworks, the onslaught of a million road signs, music in every shop, shops too hot, flashing lights, the dozens of different ways to pay for parking argggh! No wonder so many people want to retreat.

I feel the same and do the same but I know how important social interaction is for mental health. I love home and rarely feel the need to leave it.

I recently started volunteering a couple hours a week and have decided I’ll will do all sorts of these roles for my whole life as it suits me, alongside working from home. It’s the perfect way to be part of the community without any awkwardness or drama - we’re all just friendly people giving up our time to make something good happen.

Highly recommend a bit of volunteering.

I feel this very much!

In the midst of the lockdowns (when I found supermarkets quite dystopian and highly anxiety inducing), I almost had a bit of a breakdown amongst all the self-checkout tills - they were all repeating the same sentences at high volume and it felt like an attack 😫

A trip to my local small Morrisons is a sensory nightmare. There are 3 small aisles and 3 members of staff unloading stock in each one, plus the customers. It’s a game of dodge everything- walk in the same door people are coming out, stop for a cage being moved, the staff are all shouting to each other about their personal lives, the music’s playing loudly, the lights are bright, step over a crate, walk around the staff member knelt on the floor, wait for customers looking where you need to look, dodge people coming round corners, duck for a bread crate, stop for another cage.. you’re half-way round at this point!

Well, I'm very glad you are not in a position to manage women going through the horror ( as it is for some women) of the menopause.

It isn't being 'over medicalised' it is being treated. We shouldn't have to put up with the symptoms and fade away as our mother's did.

The trouble is that you can also have those feelings because of autoimmune disease. You can have them because you're in an abusive marriage or a toxic workplace with too much to do and not enough time, constant interruptions and blame slinging all about the place.

You can have them because after a frantic day at the workplace with all that, you're stuck waiting for a crammed full bus in the rain because you're not paid enough to cover the bills, only to get into the shop to find it's a mess and everything you need to get isn't in stock or where it was a week ago, then you can get in to mess, all the lights on, telly on with nobody watching it, videogames blasting away where the cocklodger is 'busy', your teenagers are beating the everlasting shit out of one another and nobody's emptied the litter tray so the cat has made a stinking protest on the doormat and the cocklodger stepped over it when he came home because 'you know I can't deal with that sort of thing'.

Ten years of this and maybe you do think you're absolutely peopled out because there is always noise and demands and mess and stress - and possibly you aren't sleeping well because of all this going round in your head (and the cocklodger insists on having a TV in the bedroom so your sleep is being constantly disturbed). So you start thinking fuck it, fuck them all, I'm not doing it like this anymore and tell somebody at work 'No' (and get bollocked for it), or tell the lazy arse manchild to get a fucking job or get the fuck out the house, or tell the kids to Just Shut Up for five minutes.

So your life could be dysfunctional, you could have completely different health issues that need to be treated or you could need to have some boundaries set and respected, completely unconnected with withering ovaries and a no longer necessary uterus.

And then some fucker pats you on the head and says 'Aww, it's your hormones, dear. happens to most women, it's terrible that nobody takes your age and decline in fertility into account. Have some antidepressants, HRT and buy some overpriced Menopause Bubble Bath and you'll feel much better'.

Not so much jumping on a bandwagon as being forcibly thrown under it.

Yes I’m the same. I think these irritations have worsened since covid.

@Movinghouseatlast oh yes it is being over medicalised. Everything is a symptom of it, everything must be treated and labelled. For a small proportion it is an illness when the body is thrown totally out of whack, for another proportion who are the worries well, it’s made to become a problem, for yet another proportion who are quite well, no matter what they say or do - it must be due to their hormones. I suspect that those of us who have gone through menopause, wether naturally or surgically, are considered some bizarre dystopian human being letting the female side down.
being thrown under the bandwagon…
@NeverDropYourMooncup has said it far more eloquently and clearly than I have. The world of any woman’s life is far more than menopause and hormones.

Actually in the hamlet in Lark Rise to Candleford, it was so small that there were no shops, literally a few houses. I was thinking of it recently - there’s a great series called Help, I bought a Village which reminded me of it. Most of the European villages bought on it were four or five houses and a couple of communal barns. Possibly lived in by extended family, definitely no shops or businesses. Thats more what I’d consider a hamlet.

Miss Marple definitely lives in a large village that would be considered a small town by Irish standards. (I am Irish, we def have a good few lonely wee crossroads with a couple of houses masquerading as villages!)

@NeverDropYourMooncup

So your life could be dysfunctional, you could have completely different health issues that need to be treated or you could need to have some boundaries set and respected, completely unconnected with withering ovaries and a no longer necessary uterus.
And then some fucker pats you on the head and says 'Aww, it's your hormones, dear. happens to most women, it's terrible that nobody takes your age and decline in fertility into account. Have some antidepressants, HRT and buy some overpriced Menopause Bubble Bath and you'll feel much better'.

This really struck a chord with me. I'm supportive of the fact that people are talking more about the menopause and that its lost a lot of its stigma. In general I think that's a good thing and it has made it much easier for many women to get the support they previously weren't. So I don't want to go back to the days when it was absolutely unmentionable.

And yet, and in part due to the efforts of Davina et al, I feel like I am expected to talk about it all the bloody time with women of my age at the moment. I can't help finding it incredibly frustrating when everything bad that happens to women of a certain age is automatically attributed to the menopause. It's simplistic, it minimises other environmental factors which may actually be much more relevant, such as the quality of relationships and economic wellbeing and its part and parcel of this whole tendency of assuming that women are at the mercy of their hormones (see also teenage girls and their periods).

I have a colleague who is roughly the same age as me (early 50s) who will look at me every time I have a bad day or make a mistake at work and whisper "it's the change isn't it?" It drives me fucking mental. Not everything in my life is dictated by the menopause.

I do think menopause makes people much less inclined to tolerate sub-par social interactions but it's not the only factor here.

Lol

@Wiccan
I know plenty of women late 20s early 30s that have the health level of a 70 year old because they are so damned lazy . Women in their 40s/ 50s now are so different to 20 years ago

Agree! I am 60 and sooo much fitter than I was in my 20s and 30s. In my 20s I was drinking a lot, eating badly and never, ever exercised and often felt exhausted I think because I was lazy and unfit. In my 30s with a lot of work and young kids all I wanted to do was slump at home after I had got obligatory stuff like work and school runs done. It wasn’t until my 50s that I really started looking after myself and I am now fitter than my 20 something kids.

There is nothing wrong in wanting a quieter life. However, your first paragraph seems to suggest that there is more to it.

@Thepeopleversuswork

feel like I am expected to talk about it all the bloody time with women of my age at the moment. I can't help finding it incredibly frustrating when everything bad that happens to women of a certain age is automatically attributed to the menopause. It's simplistic, it minimises other environmental factors which may actually be much more relevant, such as the quality of relationships and economic wellbeing and its part and parcel of this whole tendency of assuming that women are at the mercy of their hormones (see also teenage girls and their periods)

I so totally, totally agree with you! The constant discussion about hormones plays into the ‘hormonal women’ stereotype. IMO men seem to be at the mercy of their hormones even more because they apparently can’t help being aggressive and thinking about sex all the time (I don’t actually think this is true of most men btw, but does seem to be taken for granted) and yet nobody head tilts and says ‘ooh dear, poor men suffering from their hormones perhaps they should get some treatment’

There so, so, so many societal and cultural reasons why it is tough for women in their 50s. I wish we talked about that more, rather than putting it down to hormones.