Summer 2020 😷

The summer of 2020 was extraordinarily different from any summer than any of us currently alive have lived through. For the most part, there wasn't any vacations, or concerts, or wine festivals or anything else really. Or at least, it would've probably been an outrageously bad idea to have done any of those things.

It made me realize that, while summer is the season of youth, it’s also the season of extroversion. It’s the season where extroverts get together in large groups and go wild, and it’s the season when we introverts are most expected to go along with it.

The summer of 2020, for the first time in any of our lives, was the opposite. It was the first — and, God willing, only — summer on record where the introverts got to hang out at home and read books and watch movies and the extroverts were expected to go along with it. Of course, I would’ve sincerely rather there not have been a global pandemic, but I’m also not about to feel guilty for suddenly having the time to finally read Sun Tzu’s ”The Art of War"

Next summer, I sincerely hope we’ll be able to have pool parties again, making s’mores on someone’s back deck while burning through some light beer that none of us actually like but we bought because it was cheap. I hope next summer will have trips to Disney World for the kids and cruises to Miami for the retirees again. I hope we can do all those things we love again.

But this year, I definitely didn't mind not having to come up with some excuse to leave the pool party because my social gas tank had run dry, or find some reason to excuse myself back to the hotel room because I needed to be alone for, like, just 10 minutes.

In light of everything going on, I’m latching on to one gleaming, glittery bit of positivity, which is that, at least, this was the summer for introverts.