“Woodsqueer”, Anonymous2024-01-27 (anxiety, meditation)⁠:

This lady sounds a lot like me.

I lived 6 years nearly entirely isolated in the wilderness. I went 5 months without seeing another human one winter, and 3 months a few other times. I loved it. Where I live, such a thing while rare wasn’t unheard of like it is nowadays, to the point that there’s even a slang term the old folks use to describe people like me who have spent too long alone; “woodsqueer”. I did develop an awful habit of thinking out loud, and I’m scared of people in an unusual way and get panic attacks now if I’m in too busy of an area or around a lot of people for a prolonged period of time. If you’ve ever heard of the jumping Frenchmen thing, that ran in my family a few generations back when they were still living in the lumber camps, and I’ve been notably more prone to behavior like that ever since living alone. I also, I admit, have developed somewhat of an internet addiction ever since coming back to town. I don’t know if that’s related or not though, since it seems like half everyone’s got one now.

But, throughout that whole time I rarely ever felt actually alone. I feel much more comfortable just sitting out a whole night in the woods than sitting an hour in a restaurant, and I got to know the routines and habits of a lot of the animals and plants I lived with just like one would with one’s human neighbors. They didn’t feel so different than me out there. I knew particular trees and ravens, and watched generations of foxes and hares and blueberries and deer and ermines grow up and raise children of their own. And even if I wasn’t sitting down and petting them like people expect out of a relationship with a dog or cat I felt a certain sense of mutual respect and recognition with the organisms I interacted with regularly. I never experienced hallucinations and I didn’t lose a sense of time (if anything my sense of time was considerably heightened, watching the seasons, the daily routines of the animals and plants, the moon, the rivers, and all of that). So I really don’t think I would have made it in the cave, no humans doesn’t mean no people.

See Also:

• In A Perpetual Present: The Strange Case of the Woman Who Can’t Remember Her Past—Or Imagine Her Future

• Different Worlds

• Social psychology. Just think: the challenges of the disengaged mind

• The Communal Organization of Solitary Mammals

• The Strange Brain of the World’s Greatest Solo Climber: Alex Honnold doesn’t experience fear like the rest of us

• About Henry Darger