Isolation as a coping mechanism?

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Very, very much so and the old i get the worse? its getting. i dont find any social contact enjoyable, even online its stressful. face to face i barely utter a word to anyone. The phycologist who diagnosed me said hes concerned that eventually ill shut down and have no contact with anyone. but the fact is im not sure if i even want it anymore.

i do keep thinking i was born in the wrong time period. it wasnt that long ago that it was common for people to not really travel that far and have a close group. but now everyone is expected to be social butterflies tweeting when they go to the toilet and what latte they ordered.

to me isolation is an island of stability and calm. i know whats going to happen, i dont have constant stress from unknown situations i cant predict.

Yes I know how you feel. I always wonder if after a while, the isolation ends up being a habit, or if theres just some form of stability in being alone, but its almost like a kind of living purgatory maybe

I'd love to be able to withdraw as long as I need to to recharge my batteries, but then have people ready and eager to interact with me without recrimination when I come back out of my shell. Too bad that withdrawing for days at a time means that other people aren't close to me when I am ready to deal with them.

I'm married with three kids. Weekends seem to be getting harder to get through. So much discussion surrounds every move it seems like. Then I hide in my office for hours and waste time on the internet because my brain is fried. Then I go back to work. Then the weekend comes again.

The last kid turns 18 in seven years.

This summer my new job provided me with my own apartment, which I share with a cat. For the last 15 years (i'm 36), I've lived with a spouse & some roommates, and after we split I was so poor my only option was to live in big punk houses with a dozen people or more. stress & drama, drama & stress.

I would hibernate for long periods, a month or two holed up in my room reading or sewing. I actually got kicked out of a house for not partying enough, nevermind that I did all the cleaning and dishwashing for those idiots.

For quite a while, I believed that living in groups was the moral high ground, less resource usage and the benefits of tool sharing and the like.

But now I find that i love living alone. Haven't really made any friends at my new location, and it really doesn't bother me in the slightest. From my personal experience, it seems like most of the people I've ever met are people that wanted me to teach them a skill or do a project for them. As soon as they learn/recieve what they want, they drop me and move on.

Of the thousands of people that I know and have hung out with, there's only about 5 of them who ever wanted to just hang out w/ me, without having some obvious ulterior motive that they wanted to apply my skills to. I don't miss those people (the users), not at all. I'm not (very) bitter about that, and I actually enjoy running into acquaintances and making pointless small talk.

But living in isolation doesn't feel like "coping" to me. It just feels like nice. I've never slept this well in my life, and never before been so focused and on-target at work, or had so much time for hobbies and reading.

I'm only 15, and I may not have much experience compared with most of the people on here, but I developed my own coping mechanism for social situations such as school, and being in public at all. I learned to turn off my emotions until I can be alone, then I go head and do whatever, but if things are getting bad, then I need to find something to distract me. Being alone can be good to help you cope, but don't rely on it completely, find something else to help you, otherwise, anything you do will eventually fail.