The Need To Be Alone.

I have just returned from a friend's birthday party after a long day at work. Some good friends have come over to our place to revel in the Saturday night.

I sneak away upstairs and click onto Facebook and just scroll through status update after status update and carry out a conversation with another friend via Facebook chat.

It might seem almost anti-social for me to leave my friends like that on a Saturday night, but they are understanding and do not ask after me.

Later, while in the shower and washing off what was today I think to myself, 'What is wrong with me? Am I really anti-social?' - or is there just something innate that makes us want to be alone sometimes.

I look at my work and obviously it is a very people intensive one. I work with wonderful staff and nurses and the care of our patients is achieved through phone calls and beeping pagers and written notes. The humanity of our work means we will negotiate our way daily past unreasonable expectations and sometimes difficult people - staff, patients and their family members alike.

After work, I visit Karen at her workplace and spend more time with our friends, which usually spills over into dinner time. Home finally, and we try and protect the time that we have together, and yet, as much as I love my wife, I sometimes keep her at arms' length and tell her that I need to be alone. She doesn't always comprehend this need, and I can't explain it away either.

And so I escape. Facebook seems like an odd choice, given that it is social media, but sometimes it is a nice quiet one-way window to all your friend's world, to see what is going on in everybody else's life, and to wish that you too were on that vacation on that sunset-kissed beach or in Paris.

We all 'veg out' in different ways - we curl up in bed with a good book, we let our mouths hang open as we watch a mind-numbing reality series on television, we scan through hours and hours of what can only be described as glorious rubbish on Youtube. 

My friends who understand this phenomenon call it the 'retreating into the man-cave' which I found quite amusing. The term itself suggests that it is a primitive instinct - that our ancestors once too, needed to be alone, away from the mammoths and other cave-dwelling neighbours. The gender attached to the cave begs the question - what do women do?

I believe that it is in this down time, when our brains are in screensaver mode, that we do our best thinking. Our subconscious is given a chance to relax and reorganise our thoughts and secretly solve our problems in the background while we perform seemingly unproductive tasks.

Actual photograph of me on Facebook. 

According to a good friend, the best definition of whether you are an introvert or extrovert is how you recharge - introverts recharge in the solitude of their own company while extroverts recharge around other people. I have always scored down the middle in all the personality tests - both the jester and the philosopher.

So if you are with me one day and I have quietly sneaked away from you, I hope you don't find me rude. I am just recharging, and perhaps just like my forefathers before me - reclaiming a little of who I am.