Tag: Introvert

An Empty Weekend

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Recently I made mention of the fact that I had burned through a lot of my social bandwidth lately, so I decided that I would go training on Friday, have a naughty beverage at HPS afterwards and then have a quiet weekend. It was a success. On Saturday I did some groceries in the morning, having gotten up bright and early (a rarity for Saturdays following an evening at HPS). The rest of the morning was spent writing on the game that I’m going to be running.

In the afternoon, the rest of my gaming group came over and we gamed until the early evening. Then Moulsari came over, we ate together and watched the remainder of Wild Wild Country. The following day I spent writing and gaming until Joasia came back from Poland. We briefly watched something together and called it a day.

I haven’t had a quiet weekend like that in ages and it was exactly what the doctor ordered.

Introverted

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Lately, my social schedule has been pretty busy. I enjoy having stuff to do, seeing my friends, partying with them, hanging out with them, helping them out or having them help me out. I enjoy keeping close touch (though I admit I’m not very good at it when it comes to some long distance friendships) and regularly touching base.

Having said that, I’m also noticing that with time, my introverted nature is getting more pronounced and that the moments that I need to lock myself away and spend time by myself are coming around more frequently. Whether it’s gaming, coding something, watching some television or reading a book, these moments become more valuable as time goes on.

I wonder if this is because at my advancing age I am simply less capable of toughing it out and red-lining my social life, or whether my introverted nature is getting more entrenched, like a river etching itself into the bedrock. Regardless, I want to apologise to anyone if I haven’t been keeping in touch with you as regularly as I should, or haven’t been as socially available as before.

It’s not you, it’s me.

Being an Extraverted Introvert

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I came across the listicle “19 Struggles Of Having An Outgoing Personality But Actually Being Introverted” and thought it awfully familiar. I thought I’d cross-post it here so thought I wouldn’t lose it.

1. You’re not anti-social, you’re selectively social.

2. At any given point, you have one (maybe two) best friends who are your entire life. You’re not a “group of friends” person. You can’t keep up with all that.

3. Social gatherings that are supposed to be “rites of passage” like prom and dances and other such typical nonsense is just… not for you. You don’t understand it. You want nothing to do with it.

4. When you do choose to grace a party with your presence, you are the life of it. You’re dancing on the table and doing body shots until 3 a.m.

5. … You then retreat into three days of complete solitude to recover.

6. You go out of your way to avoid people, but when you inevitably have to interact with them, you make it seem like there’s nothing in the world you’d rather be doing.

7. Dating is weird, because you’re smiling and laughing and talkative at dinner, and then you don’t want to answer their texts for four days, because like, you just want to be left alone…

8. You’re accused of being flirty with everybody, which is hilarious, because in reality, you can only tolerate like four people.

9. You retain an air of mysteriousness about you, completely unintentionally. (There’s no mystery. You just feel no need to update the social sphere on what’s going on in your life every two hours.)

10. Not to mention the fact that you either have days in which you’re tweeting and status updating every five minutes… or you delete your accounts for a month.

11. You become unintentionally awkward because you at once feel the need to be a social life jacket for other people, though you’re just as uncomfortable yourself.

12. You’ve never really understood the whole “introvert vs. extrovert” dichotomy (can we call it that?) Because you’re… both…

13. You’re always run through the ringer because people think you’re best suited to be the one who gives the presentation, confronts the boss, gives the speech, etc. Meanwhile, you’re practically throwing up over the thought of it.

14. You ebb and flow between wanting to be noticed for your hard work, reveling in the attention and achievement you receive, to sinking and panicking over the thought of somebody else paying more than 30 seconds of attention to you.

15. The entirety of your being is a conundrum, so needless to say, indecisiveness is your Achilles’ Heel.

16. You’re at your happiest in places like coffee shops and cafés: surrounded by people, but still closed off and keeping to yourself.

17. You prefer to travel alone, but meet up with people once you’re there, on your own terms and at your own speed.

18. It’s taken you years to figure out that you’re different than many introverts you know. Literal years.

19. While we were chastised as children for daydreaming, we do so deliberately as adults, as our inner lives are rich, fertile, and sustain us.

Edit: This TED talk is relevant to the subject.