The Hidden Introvert

I said to Luke last spring that I thought it was time I went to find the hidden introvert in me. He laughed and said something about that being redundant.

Most writers are introverts by nature. I’m an extrovert. At least that’s what I’ve thought all these years. Yet events occurred last year that made me look at that assumption and reconsider what I’d taken as truth.

Maybe I’d spent a whole lot of energy trying to be an extrovert, when really I’m not. Maybe I’m an actor who’s really good at pretending to be one. After all, I was a painfully shy child, and I still think of myself as awfully self-conscious.

The best definitions of those terms I’ve come across are those of the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator. It says that, under stress, extroverts need to talk out their problems, while introverts need to think them through. That talking versus thinking thing could be just where I let myself get mislead. There might be other reasons why I want to talk things out . . . Perhaps the talking that I do is not the extrovert’s need to find out what I’m thinking, but the fact that I find people incomprehensible, and I need a translator in order to think things through.

I know my social skills are learned and not natural talents. Otherwise I wouldn’t get things wrong so often. I've worked too hard to get the social skills I know I've got for them to be natural. I also know that things I say sound like the words of introverts. I say things like “Life would be so much easier if no people were involved.” On the other hand, I’m saying that, not thinking it.

The extrovert things I really like all involve me being in charge of the microphone. That puts me in control of the talking.

Extroverts often think introverts are witless, because they don’t jump in a conversation with their ideas. Introverts think extroverts are intellectually frivolous, because they don’t think before they speak. Everyone has both, but prefers one over the other, especially in times of stress or important work. Still I wonder whether I’ve trained myself to work against my nature, to be an extrovert when my introvert needed more space?

Could that be why I go blind after meetings? Does that explain how cranky I get when people interrupt me constantly with stupid, little detailed things that they should be able to figure out on their own and not have to bother me with when I'm in the middle of a problem I'm trying to solve in my head? Er. Ahem.

I’m going to have to think about this.

Silly me. I thought the answer was hidden.

—me strauss Letting me be