Dear world: you are still introverted, and I still have to learn to live in it.
A few years ago, I posted my feelings of struggle of being an extrovert in an introverted world, and since then, I still have a very hard time finding articles about extroverts who are suffering in such a reality. There are many articles, books, videos, etc. about introverts. What about people like me? It's still hard, and I've even come out of the closet as an extrovert, because I'd been pretending too long and felt like I'd explode.
Basically, I'm pretty much back where I started. When I started this blog, I was translating various languages, writing, and editing. Since I'm married to an introvert and met a lot of other people who are introverted (yes, they are out there, and I force them to admit it because I can spot the signs), I tried very hard to be the same way. I kept trying to convince myself that my isolating work situation could be tolerated, and I'd be able to survive. But I kept feeling crazy and frustrated. Yet I continued doing that kind of work for years and really thought there was something wrong with me because I felt blank and cut off.
Then I started teaching again (I'd quit for 5 years due to a horrendous experience), and I felt normal. I felt good. Not only did I have wonderful students (adult ESL), but my coworkers were friendly and loved to talk, too. It was like my gray, isolationist written word-oriented world got a major dose of color, and I was able to plug in to some active current that remains obscured in the introverted world.
But I continued to be in denial about my need to talk and express myself, and my enjoyment of interacting with outgoing people. The problem is that I love translating, writing, editing, and reading, but I am not the silent, anti-social type. I'm not energized by spending hours in front of a computer. I need to get up and find an interesting person to blab with before returning to the silent world of ideas. It's been a struggle, but I've accepted my limitations and am now telling people what I need. I even told a few people at a very introverted job I have (i.e., people around me are introverted and the work is silently solitary), and one of them took pity on me and occasionally has spirited conversations with me. Such charity is very important to people like me who must act a certain way to survive and thrive.
And research supports what I'm saying. Pretty much the only article I found online about the suffering of extroverts in an introverted world was The Cost of Faking Your Personality at Work, which quoted an academic who said "it seems like extroverts suffer when they pretend to be introverts at work, and more so than introverts who pretend to be extroverts. When naturally talkative and social people had to be quiet and solitary for long periods of time at their desks, they reported less job satisfaction and more stress than the extroverts whose jobs allowed them to act like themselves."
Thank you Sanna Balsari-Palsule, who discovered that, and thank you Melissa Dahl, who wrote the article! You are providing a service to us non-introverted nerds/geeks who do not fit with their introverted cohorts! There are other people like me who love to think, write, etc., but need a situation like late 19th-century Paris when artists would get together in cafes and hang out and laugh and talk and argue and drink and have a rowdy time!
Because of the introverted structure of society, such people are behind their computers (like me right now), posting to social media on their handhelds or whatever, avoiding human interaction, because technology has created walls that are only scalable via the digital divide!
I would like to mention a fellow extrovert who has admitted to the world that she, too, struggles with mandatory introverted work: I found Katie Lubarsky's blog post after an extensive search. She says "Basically, I prefer being around people. I like working in groups, interacting with others, and sharing thoughts and ideas. It energizes me, inspires me, and keeps me focused." She's a student (or was one when she wrote the post) who is "an extrovert who is trying to write a thesis. Which, by its very nature, is an activity that tends to isolate one from other humans. It’s a solitary pursuit- just me, myself, and my computer, day in and day out." She also says "I find my suppressed extroversion manifesting in all sorts of counterproductive ways" and admits "Even writing this blog, which I promise you is not exactly what I should be spending my time on right now, is an attempt to communicate with the outside world."
Bingo! That was why I started this blog. I love language and didn't have people to talk about it with and didn't have coworkers to chat with (a major drawback of doing solitary freelance work), so I reached out to the world to express myself and have at least a vague feeling that people were "listening" (based on the thousands of hits I used to get from all over the world). What I discovered was that I love blogging to the point that I ended up blogging for other people, including ghost-writing, and even started a secret blog (which I shut down and have relocated to another host to create yet another secret blog).
What sparked this most recent post about the subject (about which I'll probably post again) was that today I was "playing" tennis (quotes for actually just hitting a ball badly) with an extrovert (who had an extroverted career) and an introvert (who probably suffered in a semi-extroverted career). We extroverts kept talking and stopped hitting the ball, which annoyed the introvert. I honestly couldn't tell if the introvert was disgusted by the true personality I was revealing, or if he was just throwing some mild comments out there, but it made me feel self-conscious, causing me to reconsider my behavior. Perhaps that should be a case in which I suppress my true personality to survive yet another introverted situation. Thus this blog post. Because I love expressing myself, I had to write something, since the tennis excursion was the only extroverted opportunity I've literally had all day.
I'm not saying I'm going to quit my introverted work (more hours are spent silently writing and editing than teaching), but I will continue to find outlets to express myself to counteract the IPS (Introverted Power Structure). What will inevitably happen, as occurred today, will be that I will encounter people who are either introverts drained by people like me, or people high up on the hierarchy of personality who find it disgusting that I'm rising above my station to actually talk...because people who are low on the hierarchy don't have the right to talk unless spoken to (and even then, words have to be limited).
Hopefully, other extroverts will share their feelings online (unless they're too busy talking to live humans), so that the introverts who are constantly complaining will understand the power they have, and the rules they've set.
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