Most people who meet me mistakenly think that I am an extrovert. I can understand this. In a group, I like to make people laugh, I am able to speak up without being asked a direct question and I don’t tend to need a lot of time to think about things before giving an answer. I enjoy hanging out with my friends and I’m not ‘the quiet one’ in any of my groups.
Any more.
When I was about 19, I became good friends with a girl who I had known from high school. She was in the grade below me but she and I had been in a mixed age drama group. She had started studying law, and as I was doing the same course, she paid me to tutor her once a week and look over her assignments etc before she submitted them. Time passed and we began spending more time together, and she drew together a group of people, many of whom had been my friends in high school.
This girl was amazing. She sparkled. She had a heart as big as the ocean. She complimented people all the time, on big things and small things. The little things that were done for her were always big things to her. She loved people who were musical and artistic and went out of her way to support them. She loved people and called them sweetie and babe all the time. Sometimes people questioned her sincerity because they didn’t believe that anyone could be that cute. She had so much confidence in who she was. Her outlook on life was so sunny and positive. She was the life of the party, the centre of the group and genuinely the most beautiful person I had ever met.
I hated myself. I was shy and quiet and super, super sensitive. When my friends would make fun of me, in a friendly way, I would cry. I would cry if I lost at board games. I had no confidence. I genuinely did not understand why people would want to spend time with me, and constantly questioned the status of my friendships. In group situations I sat back and listened, and the only time I did speak was one-on-one with people I felt I could trust. As much as I trusted anyone back then. I was intensely negative about everything.
Eventually, I decided that I could either go on being the way I was and hating myself, or I could change. And as this girl was the best person I had ever met, I modelled new behaviours on her. I opened my heart to people. I complimented them. I made myself look at things in a more positive light. Obviously I didn’t do a ‘Single White Female’ and try to become exactly like her, I did make a conscious decision to emulate things in her, and other people, I liked, so I would like myself more.
It was a struggle at first, but over time it became second nature. And now some of those things are part of the very core of who I am, not something I just put on at the beginning of the day.
That girl went on to become my best friend, Rachel, and is still the most beautiful, loving and supportive person I know.
But the point of the story is that a lot of my group behaviours are learned behaviours. Sometimes, especially as I grow older and feel less pressure to impress people or to get my point of view across, I find myself settling back into that old role of watcher, listener. And it is like a comfortable pair of slippers. It feels right to me.
Once in my mid-twenties, as part of a team building exercise for our youth ministry team at church, a group of us did the Myers-Briggs personality testing. There were some extreme introverts in our group, as well as a couple of extroverts. I was universally predicted to come out as an extrovert, and to the surprise of everyone but myself, I came back as an introvert.
The Myers-Briggs testing explains the introvert vs extrovert dichotomy in a variety of ways, but the two indicators I have always found the most useful are energy and thoughtfulness.
(I’m generalising and paraphrasing here. Let’s not get our knickers in a twist about how not ALL introverts and extroverts are like this. It’s personality testing. It’s not one size fits all.)
Extroverts get their energy from people. They like to have people around them all the time. They are constantly making lunch dates, dinner dates, coffee dates. Connecting with people is important, not only for their relationships, but for themselves, as that’s what re-energises them. Extroverts don’t like lots of time alone. They find it draining, and after spending time alone need to reconnect with people to recharge. Extroverts figure out what they think/feel by talking it through with people, and are usually able to express themselves in the moment without having to ponder questions overlong.
Introverts need time alone. Introverts find time with people draining, and seek to recharge by spending time on their own. Introverts figure out what they think and feel about something by reflecting on it in their own time and if they don’t have a pre-prepared position, find it difficult to come out in favour or opposed to something on immediate questioning. Introverts find prolonged group time difficult, and prefer small groups or one-on-one to large groups.
I love my friends and have spent plenty of time in group situations. In fact – I spent three and a half months in Kenya sharing a room with at least one other person the whole time. Six weeks of that was living 24 hours a day seven days a week with 12 other people! But it was hard. My team mates will attest to the fact that I struggled with it and took plenty of time off by myself. Sometimes with my guitar, sometimes with a notepad, sometimes just laying out under the stars. I was working through my shit, and when I was ready to talk about it, I would.
That’s not to say that I don’t learn from talking about things, because I do. I’m never so closed-minded about things that I can’t have a moment of ‘wow, I’d never thought about it that way before’, but I do like to have some idea about how I feel before I wade in.
And I spend a lot of time thinking about a lot of things. My mum is fond of telling me that my brain never stops, and my friend Dean has often lamented the lack of an off switch for my thoughts. I guess that’s why when in a group situation I’m ready to answer questions put directly to me – there’s not much that I haven’t already thought about enough to have a preliminary position. At least, not in the groups that usually I find myself in.
This weekend I spent a night away for a friend’s 30th birthday at a beach house in Rye. I knew very few of the people there for the night, and when the talk turned to things science and medical (as that seems to be the field that most people worked in), my fallback position was listener. I had never heard of, let alone thought about, some of the things that were spoken about. So I didn’t venture an opinion, because I didn’t have one yet.
If I’m not sure, I still seek out the views and opinions of people, but it’s after long considered thought on my own first. And it’s usually not in a large group, it’s usually one on one or a couple of people.
This has ended up being a lot longer and a lot more detailed than I had originally planned.
You see, the reason I’m posting this now is because I’ve been really struggling over the past week or so. Initially I thought it was a bipolar thing – that I was having a swing of some kind and it was affecting my mood. I’ve been really frustrated and angry. My fuse has been short and while I felt I’ve covered that up pretty well, I’ve not liked how that has been feeling.
Part of that has been a lack of sleep – I have been stressed and having nightmares, as well as a couple of late nights.
But I’ve been realising over the past 24 hours or so that it’s more about where my energy is coming from. I’ve been craving time alone. Time to just be, on my own, to think and write and feel and play.
The nature of my work is people oriented – I work in an open plan environment in a team that is very reliant on open communication with each other throughout the day. I deal with clients and solicitors on the phone throughout the day, as well as coming to grips with what can be some pretty confronting factual situations in my work.
My job is therefore pretty demanding and when the work levels there are normal, it is just enough for me to balance, in terms of energy. But when things are difficult at work – when there is an increased workload, when there are workplace tensions, when there are external pressures such as budgetary issues – the issue gets compounded. Being at work takes a lot more energy for me, and so I am drained much more quickly.
Sometimes I feel bad about the fact that I don’t really go out on weeknights, and that most of my weekends are spent at home doing quiet things, or doing things out and about on my own. I am now realising that this is not just okay, but it’s crucial in my abillity to recharge to be able to be at the top of my game the next week.
The past week has not been a bipolar thing – although the tiredness and lack of time to recharge has triggered some symptoms – this has been about my ability to take care of myself in the way that I know works for me.
And that’s hard sometimes, when people think that I am the life of the party, the centre of attention, the clown, the joker, the voice, the spokesperson or the organiser. Because while I am able to play those roles, they are not what comes naturally to me. And saying no is hard, especially to people you love.
Now that I’ve worked that out, I think that I am better placed to subconsciously and consciously work through some of the other feels that have been raised over the course of the weekend. The feels are about topics completely unrelated, and I feel completely unprepared to talk about them right now. They’re about things I’ve been thinking about for a while now, but apparently am now ready to start engaging with, which is kind of scary, but also exciting.
