Time & Perspective Quote by Lynda Barry

The sly comedy here is the way Barry frames solitude as if it were an eccentric hobby, lumped in with birdwatching and reading like faintly embarrassing side quests. It’s a cartoonist’s sentence: plainspoken, slightly self-mocking, with the real punchline hiding in the negative space. She doesn’t brag about transformation; she admits, almost sheepishly, that she “used to” be the kind of person who was always in the mix. The subtext is that constant sociability can function as insulation, even avoidance. Not necessarily of people, but of the quieter, stranger work of noticing.

Birds matter because they’re the opposite of “social life” as performance. You don’t look at birds to be seen looking at birds. You look, you wait, you fail, you look again. Reading works the same way: it’s private, patient, and it refuses the rapid feedback loop of being liked, laughed with, invited. Barry’s pairing suggests an artist learning to tolerate the unglamorous tempo that attention requires.

Contextually, it also reads like an origin story for making art later in life, or making it differently. Cartooning is built from solitary acts (drawing, revising, staring) that only become “social” after the fact, when a page meets an audience. Barry’s intent isn’t to romanticize isolation; it’s to underline the cost of never being alone long enough to hear your own thoughts. The sentence treats that cost lightly, which is exactly why it lands. It’s an admission delivered with a wink, and the wink is doing protection-and-revelation at once.