We had our baby shower this weekend. It was a great day. So many people showed up for us with love, support, and gifts. It was overwhelming in a lot of ways, most of them good.
It also reminded me just how lonely I feel in a group of people.
That sounds backwards. How can someone surrounded by people feel lonely? The claim here is narrow. You can be in a room full of people who love you and still be the only one without the playbook. And when that room fills with conversations, I do not hear conversations. I hear one sound. Nobody at the party did anything wrong. We were having different experiences of the same room.
I feel like a Pepsi walking around in a world of Coca-Cola. From across the room we look like the same thing. We are not.
The Playbook
A party has no agenda. That is the point of it. People drift between conversations, laugh, refill their drinks, wander off, and wander back. Everyone else seems to know how this works. It feels like they were all handed a playbook and a code at some point, and I was out that day.
So while everyone else is enjoying the free nature of the party, I am trying to find my place. Where do I stand? When do I join a conversation, and how do I leave one? Is this the moment to say something, or has it passed? Each of those is a small decision other people do not seem to make at all. I make dozens of them, and every one reminds me how different I am from everyone else in the room.
That reminder is the loneliness. The people at the shower fit in. They had a good time. It’s me that doesn’t fit in.
Too Many Channels
It was also extremely loud. Not the way people usually mean it.
The volume was fine. The problem was the number of channels. Researchers call this the cocktail party problem — how a listener picks one voice out of a room full of them — and most people solve it without noticing. I can hear. What I cannot do, past a certain number of overlapping conversations, is tell them apart. I can only handle limited channels at once. Past that, every conversation in the room collapses into one giant incomprehensible blob. I wrote about what an open floor plan cost me at work in The Storage Closet; a party is the same math with nicer people.
So if you were at the party, and you were talking to me, and I was smiling and nodding: I could hear you. I could not decode what you were saying. I was so overwhelmed and overstimulated that your words were in the blob with everyone else’s. The smile was real. The nod was my best guess.
Enjoy your party. This isn’t a pity fest. It is an explanation of why I may not seem as into it as everyone else.
I Thought Everyone Heard It This Way
For a long time I did not realize everyone was not like this. I assumed the blob was what a party sounded like, and that other people were better at putting up with it. Tougher than me, or more patient, or faking it.
They were not. They were getting a vastly different experience. Now it makes sense why others can enjoy these things. In their room, the conversations stay separate. In mine, they do not. We were at the same party hearing two different ones.
By Himself
I found how to make it work for me. I took breaks. When I needed it, I found my own space. I watched baseball. I played with the dogs.
Matthew has a scene I keep coming back to. Jesus has just spent a long day with a crowd — about five thousand men, Matthew says, besides women and children — curing their sick and feeding all of them from five loaves and two fish. Then:
And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone. (Matthew 14:23)
Luke makes it a habit rather than a single night. As the crowds kept growing, “he would slip away to deserted places and pray” (Luke 5:16).
The text does not say why he went, only that he did. Stepping away from the crowd was not a failure to love it. And alone on that mountain, he was not alone.
A baseball game is one channel. One pitch at a time, one voice calling it, crowd noise that does not need decoding. The dogs are less than one. They do not need me to follow a conversation. They need someone to play with.
The party went on without me for a while, loud and happy, everyone fluent in it. I was with the dogs, the game on, one channel at a time.
Further Reading
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (NRSVue).
- Matthew 14:13–23 — the feeding of the five thousand, then the mountain alone
- Luke 5:15–16 — the crowds grow; he slips away to deserted places to pray
- E. Colin Cherry, “Some Experiments on the Recognition of Speech, with One and with Two Ears” (Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1953) — the paper that framed the cocktail party problem
- José I. Alcántara et al., “Speech-in-Noise Perception in High-Functioning Individuals with Autism or Asperger’s Syndrome” (Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 2004) — a small study (11 autistic participants, 9 controls) in which the autistic group needed a clearer speech-to-noise ratio to follow sentences against background sound with gaps in it
- The Storage Closet — the same noise problem, at work
- In Good Company — another reading of Matthew, from a harder year
