When I get home from school I beeline straight to my room without saying a word. I lock my door once I get there and hide from the outside world and the troubles that come along with it. Staying home is easier. There are new shows being released all the time, and, I’m an introvert.

Often, I check Snapchat stories and see that my friends are outside of their houses hanging out, but I don’t understand the appeal of it. At home, I am in my own little bubble where I can escape the world. All I have to do is lock my door and no one can bother me.

However, when I do go outside, it’s almost always unpleasant. I’m tired, my feet hurt and the sun is too bright; everything and everyone finds a way to annoy me. I do not have time in my day to be complaining about how much my feet hurt. As a teenager, time is something I don’t have a lot of.

My day usually start at school, for seven hours, being forced into social interactions with our peers, and homework alone takes me two to three hours to finish. After that, eating and getting ready for bed takes another two hours and I try to get eight hours of sleep to be able to function. Being forced into family activities adds two more hours. This leaves about two hours of the day to myself which results in me taking a nap or playing games.

In addition to wanting to avoid leaving my house, it also makes me feel uneasy to have a one-to-one conversation. Specifically, eye contact is extremely uncomfortable and I would much rather text someone than meet face-to-face. Creating a connection doesn’t have to be based on how much eye contact you make but on how comfortable you are around them.

At the same time, some people associate being introverted with depression and being anti-social, this may be the preconceived idea that wanting to participate in social interactions is normal. In elementary school, we were forced to play with our peers and were considered weird if we would rather play by ourselves.

Speaking of which, I didn’t have many friends growing up and I always kept to myself rather than saying everything that came to mind like the other kids. A study by Randy Buckner shows that introverts have more grey matter in the prefrontal cortex of their brains than extroverts. We just may be quieter because we take more time to ponder and think about our ideas and consequences that may come afterward. When someone does not take time to think about consequences, their actions might come off as pushy or overdramatic.

If you think about it, enjoying social settings and wanting to go out does not have to be the social norm. People should be able to enjoy hanging out with their friends from the comfort of their homes hanging out without the pressure of leaving. There are plenty of activities that can be done inside with only a couple of friends, like video and board games are great time passers and can be extremely fun.

Living life inside my room isn’t all that bad, I may not be soaking in all the vitamin D or breathing the fresh air but I do have food and water. Also, my room is very close to a bathroom so that’s a plus. As an introvert, I would prefer to do it from the comfort of my own home in a limited time frame. Having free time at the end of the day allows me to recharge after being forced into social settings throughout the day.