Re: does being alone make you immature?
I read Ava's posts and I found it and interesting question. Ava got to a nice conclusion (no spoilers here) and She made very accurate observation of concrete cases, and I wanted to expand on the topic of this "social maturity".
When I think about being immature, the expressions "grow up" or "stop acting like a kid" come to my mind. With time, we grow older but not necessarily wiser. Maturity is a development of the mind; a learning journey towards empathy and responsibility. Now, how does being alone affect this development? Let's use drawing as an analogy.
In order to learn to draw, to do something more that a stick figure beside a house under the sun, we need to practice. There is no way in which we become great artists by just sitting at the desk, doing nothing with our crayons. In order to get better, to learn and develop, we need to engage, there is no other way. This is the issue with being alone. By refusing to engage with people, we are giving up any chance of growth. We need to draw a lot of lines until that stick figure finally slays. And we also need to paint a lot and mix the colors and see how they look together. We have to look at our drawings and see if they look good, if we are satisfied with what we did. We must engage with others and do it with intent. We must care about them, pay attention to the feedback of the interactions, observing the effect of our behavior so we can learn from it. So we can grow.
It may sound like I'm preaching, telling people to get into motion because I know better, but that's not the case. It just happens that I have been drawing some recently (even literally) and I got to learn a couple of things. This is more of an opportunity for me to write down a lesson that took me too long to start learning. I was one of the isolated, sometimes by chance, others by choice.
It happens that learning is not a one way road, it can take many routes. Sometimes things don't go as expected and we step back, we take another path. Sometimes it hits so hard that we run and hide to take our time to heal and, when this keeps happening, we learn that hiding is safe. Eventually, we get comfortable in that safety, way too much, and we stay there for too long. Drawing is and art and it is a skill. Not only we learned the wrong thing, but we also stopped practicing what we knew until we forgot it. This is how some people don't get to become socially mature.
At this point, things get tricky. When you are bad at drawing you don't feel like doing it. We just do it unwillingly, poorly. We make the same mistakes over and over again, and this kind of engaging doesn't help, it doesn't make us improve. No matter how many times we try, we don't manage to make it right, we are not satisfied with our motions. It is time to try new approaches, to look at how others do, to ask for advice, and even for help.
It is not so easy to realize it's us who are missing the skills. We are doing our best so, how can it be not enough? Who dares to make so little of my efforts? I'm just holding on, aren't we all?