On 'reopening anxiety' and Scrabble

I've been putting a lot of thought these last few months into things I never used to bother thinking about before. Basic things. Things like: How do you dress for a casual coffee meetup with a friend? How do you order a meal at a restaurant? How do you say hello when you enter a room full of humans - like, one that exists in the actual physical realm and not on Zoom?

All of these thoughts stem from the same root problem - basically, I feel like I've spent the last 16 months forgetting how to function as a person. After all, life has been weird for a while. I've spent entire days neglecting to change out of sweatpants; entire weeks where my only interactions with people outside my immediate household have been through video chats. I've been more or less completely disconnected from the outside world.

And now, I hear, there's some possibility of reentering it soon?

Oh, jeez. I suppose I should shower or something.

For a while now, I've been somewhat obsessed with reading articles about what it'll be like reentering society after a long quarantine. Not so much health-wise, or from a professional standpoint - although those are important questions, and I'm certainly curious about them too - but more psychologically. When you've been so cut off from other people for so long, what's it like to come back? How is that supposed to feel? If it feels forced and unnatural, does that make me weird? Or is that normal? I'm searching for answers anywhere I can find them.

One piece that really resonated with me was "The Age of Reopening Anxiety" by Anna Russell, published in the New Yorker about a month ago. In her piece, Russell cites survey data from the American Psychological Association showing that nearly half of Americans feel uneasy about returning to in-person interaction post-pandemic. She writes:

After a lonely year, in-person socializing feels both exciting and alien, like returning to your home town after a long while away. Will everything still be there? Will you have any friends left? Will you have anything to say? Conversation, even on a bar stool, feels creaky and unpracticed. The joints need oiling.

I felt reassured upon reading this. The message was clear: I'm not alone. Going back to your old life after a year away is hard! It doesn't make me weak if I'm struggling with this - it makes me human.

So anyway: I want to say something about "reopening anxiety" and Scrabble.

A couple of weeks ago, we announced we'd be holding live in-person Scrabble tournaments for the first time since the pandemic began in early 2020. We now have 6 events open for registration, and 37 total registrants listed so far as of this writing. Our team has put in a lot of legwork behind the scenes to get these events ready to go - finding venues, organizing logistics, figuring out appropriate health and safety protocols, and so forth. But today, I want to forget the logistical side for a minute. Let's just talk about the human side. Plain and simple: How does it feel to be getting back into Scrabble?

Scrabble these last 16 months, much like life these last 16 months, has been weird. I've played entire tournaments in sweatpants; I've played long matches with opponents with whom I've communicated only in short snippets like "hi gl" and "gg ty." Sometimes, for stretches of weeks or even months, I just haven't played at all. And now, as we face the prospect of dusting ourselves off and getting back into live competition, the future feels scary and anxiety-inducing.

I'm 100% sure that when it comes to Scrabble, I'm not alone in feeling this way. Many, many conversations I've had with friends in the game have confirmed this. I can't tell you how many times I've discussed Scrabble with a fellow player and gotten back a line like, "Oh, man, Scrabble? I can't play that, I don't even remember the twos!" or "Wait - how does this 'tile tracking' thing work again?"

I get it. I totally get it. I'm going through all of the same stuff. I think most all of us are.

I'm lucky enough to have a Scrabble spouse, which means I've had a sparring partner available throughout these last 16 months. I shouldn't take that for granted. But the truth is, Jennifer and I really haven't played all that much during this period. There's been a general feeling of Scrabble malaise - without the tournament scene, and without the broader sense of community around us, what's the point? The CoCo has been our focus nonstop, but the actual playing of the game itself has fallen by the wayside at times.

And when we have played, it's been rough, let me tell you. I'm not even sure you can call this nonsense "Scrabble." We're missing stuff. We're playing horrible phonies. There have been just incomprehensibly bad brain farts. In one memorable game we played a couple of months ago, I thought I had perfectly calculated a 428-427 win in a difficult endgame... only to realize that her outplay of OVINE, which I correctly deduced was coming, would score 16 points for her and not 14.

I had forgotten that the V was worth 4 points.

I lost by 1.

I've chastised myself a bit for some of the horrible Scrabble games I've played over the last year and change - but I've also tried to be realistic about things. I've asked myself: Isn't it natural to be off your game at a time like this? Isn't this human? Isn't this, to some extent anyway, what you should expect?

I think probably yes, yes, and yes. So I want to say, to everyone out there who's feeling a little bit of "reopening anxiety" about playing Scrabble again: I understand completely. But I also hope you won't give in and let that Scrabble despair beat you. On the contrary: I invite you to fight through it, alongside myself and everyone else who has signed up for our 6 tournaments so far.

Toward the end of that New Yorker piece about "reopening anxiety," I came across a gem of a paragraph about how best to overcome it. I'll share it in full here:

"The way to get past anxiety is really to stop avoidance," Rob Hindman, a clinical psychologist who specializes in anxiety, told me. He'll ask his patients to name an activity that's a little scary - and then something worse. Then he'll have them work up to doing those things in stages, like getting into a pool one step at a time. For patients whose keenest fear is embarrassment, Hindman will recommend a terrifying-sounding strategy called social-mishap exposure, "where you make them purposely embarrass themselves." Last year, a patient told him that he was afraid of speaking up in a group. He especially feared telling a joke, in case it fell flat. Hindman had him find a terrible joke online and deliver it, come what may. (The joke bombed, but the patient survived.) Another client, afraid of embarrassing herself in a grocery store, purposely went to the cereal aisle and knocked a few boxes onto the floor. No one cared. "The thing is, our fears tend not to come true," Hindman said. "But you need a way to actually test out whether being embarrassed or criticized is as terrible as you think it is, so you have to purposely do it." Patients realize, "Yeah, it's distressing, but I was able to do it. So it kind of takes that fear away."

I think this is sage advice, and I aim to follow it in the months ahead. When it comes to Scrabble or anything else, the best way to overcome your fear of normal life is simply to work your way into it, one stage at a time.

You may not be ready to compete for a world Scrabble championship today - and that's fine. Lord knows I'm not either. But that's OK. Think baby steps.

Take a look at the upcoming tournament calendar. Pick an event that fits your schedule. Sign up for it and prepare yourself for it - physically, mentally, and emotionally. And for the love of all that's holy, remember that the V is worth 4 points. You'll be glad you did.