When JFK was president and The Beatles hadn’t yet appeared on Ed Sullivan, nobody talked about social anxiety. You were either shy or you weren’t, and if you were, well, that was something to fix. Like a bad habit or poor posture.

I spent decades perfecting what I now recognize as a masterful performance.

Every office party, every neighborhood gathering, every extended family dinner; I showed up with my brightest smile and my most engaging small talk.

Inside, I was calculating how many minutes before I could politely leave without anyone noticing.

The vocabulary we never had

Growing up in the Midwest in the 1960s, there were exactly two categories for social behavior: Normal and needs improvement.

If you preferred reading alone to playing kickball with the neighborhood kids, that was a phase you’d outgrow; if large groups made your stomach tight, you just needed more practice.

The word “introvert” existed somewhere in psychology textbooks, but it certainly wasn’t part of everyday conversation.

Nobody said, “I need to recharge after socializing.” You pushed through because that’s what adults did.

I remember sitting in our break room during my early years in admin, watching colleagues effortlessly chat about their weekends while I rehearsed my contributions in my head.

By the time I felt ready to speak, the conversation had moved on.

This wasn’t seen as a different way of processing social situations; it was seen as not trying hard enough.

Lybi Ma, a psychologist, puts it perfectly: “Socializing is labor-intensive, whether you like it or not.”

In my generation, however, we couldn’t name that labor. We just felt exhausted and assumed everyone else was simply better at hiding it.

The masks we built

By the time I stumbled into HR, I’d constructed an entire professional persona.

Warm, approachable, always ready with the right question to keep others talking.

I became excellent at my job precisely because I’d spent so many years studying people from the outside, trying to understand the social rules that seemed to come naturally to everyone else.

The irony wasn’t lost on me.

Here I was, counseling employees through interpersonal conflicts and team dynamics while privately needing three days to recover from the company holiday party.

Yet, admitting this felt like confessing to a character flaw.

My generation became masters of compensation.

We developed scripts for every social situation, we learned to arrive early to avoid walking into crowded rooms, and we volunteered for tasks that gave us purpose and structure at gatherings.

This way, we became the photographers, the kitchen helpers, the designated drivers, or anything that provided a role beyond “just socializing.”

The cost of keeping up appearances

After decades of this performance, something shifts.

You realize the energy required to maintain your social facade hasn’t decreased with practice; if anything, it’s become more exhausting as you’ve aged.

The recovery time between gatherings stretches longer. The internal negotiations before accepting invitations become more complex.

I discovered in my fifties, after reading a book that finally gave language to my experiences, that I wasn’t broken or antisocial. I was simply wired differently.

The relief was profound, followed immediately by grief for all those years of self-criticism.

Rebekka Grun von Jolk, Ph.D., an expert on love data and economics, notes that, “Introverts can be highly social, particularly in small groups or one-on-one conversations.”

This perfectly describes my experience.

Put me at a dinner table with three close friends, and I’m engaged for hours; put me at a cocktail party with thirty acquaintances, and I’m planning my escape before I’ve hung up my coat.

The unexpected freedom of aging

Something interesting happens when you reach your seventies.

The social pressures that once felt insurmountable begin to fade.

You’ve proven whatever you needed to prove: The career ladder has been climbed or abandoned, and the kids are raised.

Suddenly, protecting your energy feels necessary.

For our 45th anniversary, my husband and I chose a quiet dinner over the big party everyone expected.

Twenty years ago, I would have felt obligated to invite everyone, to make it an event.

Now, I understand that honoring how we actually want to celebrate is more important than meeting social expectations.

Making new friends after 65 has been surprisingly liberating.

When you meet people at this stage, there’s less pretense.

You can say, “I enjoy your company, but I’m only good for about an hour of socializing before I need to go home and read.”

Increasingly, the response is, “Oh thank God, me too.”

Learning to honor your wiring

The challenge for many in my generation is unlearning decades of pushing through. We became so skilled at overriding our natural inclinations that we lost touch with what actually nourishes us.

Now, in retirement or semi-retirement, we have the opportunity to rebuild our social lives according to our actual preferences rather than perceived obligations.

I’ve started declining invitations without elaborate excuses.

“That sounds lovely, but it’s not going to work for me” is a complete sentence.

I leave gatherings when I’m ready, and I’ve stopped apologizing for preferring books to book clubs.

This is about recognizing that different people have different social capacities, and there’s nothing wrong with having a smaller tank.

The gatherings I do attend now are chosen carefully, and I’m fully present for them because I’m not depleted from forcing myself through every invitation.

Conclusion: The gift of finally understanding

My generation may have grown up without the language for introversion or social anxiety, but we’re not too old to learn it now.

Understanding that what we experience has a name, that it’s shared by millions of others, that it’s not a character flaw but simply a different way of being in the world; this knowledge is transformative at any age.

For those of us who spent decades performing extraversion, the relief of dropping that mask is profound.

Yes, every gathering still costs more than it appears to.

Now we know that’s the price, then we can budget accordingly, and we can stop pretending the bill isn’t real.

The most radical thing we can do at this stage is to stop apologizing for who we are.

To recognize that the coping mechanisms we developed weren’t weaknesses but strengths.

We succeeded in building rich inner lives while navigating a world that didn’t quite understand us, and that’s something to honor.