It’s pouring rain in San Francisco, and I decided to spend my day reading Sue Klebold’s memoir, A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy, about her son, one of the gunmen in 1999′s Columbine High School massacre. I read a review of the book this morning, and was immediately compelled to purchase it, for reasons I can’t easily explain. I’m actually in the middle of another book, a pretty good debut mystery called Out of the Blues, but I set that one aside to begin Reckoning. It felt like a critical read.

This whole week has been really busy for me, with visitors and meetings, and tomorrow is no different. But today my calendar was wide open. To some people that probably sounds nice, and even I can see the benefits of it. But here’s what happens to me when I spend too much time alone. I get withdrawn and tired, and I focus more on my ALS symptoms. Add to that that I’m reading this particularly devastating (but very good) book, and it doesn’t look like today is going to be the high point of my week.

I’m an extrovert. This was pointed out to me by my friend Brooke, who came to visit on Monday. She arrived at noon, after I had spent the morning reading magazine articles instead of blogging. I was feeling down—not sad, just low energy—when she walked in, and I told her that. “You just need someone to plug you in,” she reminded me, aiming an air cord in the direction of my belly button. By the time she left two hours later, my mood had noticeably improved.

It’s a good thing to know about yourself, no matter who you are: What energizes you, what depletes you, and how much of all of it you can handle. The thing about dealing with ALS as an extrovert is that sometimes it’s the disease that’s exhausting me, and not the people who are around. I miss the carelessness of my past, when eating was social and fun, and breathing was something to focus on in yoga class, and talking was only words unspooling from a dependable energy source—the words were the focus, not the act of pushing them across my lips.

My visiting nurse was over at the end of last week, and I mentioned to her that I was feeling a little more breathless than usual that morning. “But,” I quickly added, “that’s probably because I can’t stop talking.”

“Talking is good for you,” she said. “It means you’re getting all the breath out.”

I knew  what she meant. With ALS, difficulty inhaling is one problem and difficulty exhaling and expelling the necessary amount of carbon dioxide is another problem. Evidently it’s a problem I don’t have to worry too much about, because I’m always blathering, either to an actual person or to my dictation device.

Even extroverts need some downtime, but I knew that after an entire morning of it, I’d feel deflated. So I sent a group text to some of my girlfriends in an effort to trick myself into thinking that I was being social and not sitting alone in my house. And it sort of worked. But there’s nothing that takes the place of actual human interaction. Just like there’s nothing that takes the place of falling into a really good book and shutting up for a while.

In her great book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain writes:

We can’t say that every introvert is a bookworm or every extrovert wears lampshades at parties anymore than we can say that every woman is a natural consensus-builder and every man loves contact sports. As Jung felicitously put it, “There is no such thing as a pure extrovert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in a lunatic asylum.”

So I am an extrovert bookworm with a disease that limits my energy, and therefore my social interaction abilities. Wonder what the experts would say about that? Probably something along the lines of the advice I frequently receive:  Just take it one day at a time.

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