Isolating and then getting back out there

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Anyone ever isolate for weeks or months at a time and then get back out there in the real world, and it’s just “a lot” for you? Because you’re so accustomed to the comfort of your home and your familiar social group?

How do you not be so hard on yourself for “being out of the loop”?

Mine's more than "a lot," more like "way too much." Because they did not, once again "get me," as they usually always do.

I'm safe! I escaped and survived once again!

According to the BBC, it's a common thing to find it difficult to get back out there after isolating, even if you were a very social animal before:

https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-57100378

At least a few NTs finally got to experience what socialising might be like in general for people with ASD. Not that I think it needs a shrink to explain it. If you don't do a thing for a long time, you get rusty. If that thing is dealing with people, your social standing is at stake, so it's going to get stressful if you feel (as I guess most people do) that your social standing will have a large bearing on the quality of your existence.

I've experienced something like it myself, though I've never really plunged into a lot of socialising after being isolated for a long time, so the effect has never been all that great. And as long as I keep up my "social interaction" in the form of the written word, I find that seems to keep me fairly articulate in a way that doesn't feel hard to transfer to the realtime world of the spoken word. If I've just been having a good instant-messaging session with somebody and then I happen to meet somebody I know in "real life," I can often get the banter going effortlessly enough. But it is hard to get used to the more physical changes such as not having so much control over the environment. Such problems as background noise, having nowhere to sit down, and the challenge of having to somehow get included in a group of people to whom I seem to be invisible, those things can be quite a shock to experience again. Not that I was ever great at solving that kind of problem.

Certainly I worry about being "out of the loop," and I feel the pain of loneliness acutely enough, especially as I get older and I realise I don't have decades ahead of me to figure out how to put it all right, and that I could die lonely. But I try not to be hard on myself about it. It's not really my fault, just one of those things. I'm not a genius. I don't know how to fix it, and for all I know there might be no way of fixing it. I do often get annoyed at myself when I zone out when I'm in social situations, but it's not as if I could will myself out of behaving like that. I rather think that it's impossible for me to get on well with most groups, and that the people have to be of a rare type for me to be able to make much progress with them. In the end I don't much care if I can't cope in groups anyway, as long as I can do one-on-one often enough.