I’m curious if anyone has met someone who acts very extroverted but insists they are introverted. There’s one in my life.
She constantly tortures me with the TMI details of her life. She never shuts up, and gets her feelings hurt easily if you tell her you want to be alone. I have stopped eating lunch with her, for instance, because she was getting on my nerves. I was subjected to, “WHY don’t you want to eat with ME anymore!!!” Because you TALK TO MUCH, you crazy bitch. (OK, I didn’t say that. But I wanted to.)
But she says she’s introverted. Either she doesn’t know what that means, or her persona is totally false. I’m guessing it’s the former. She has mistaken “not having a rich social life” with being introverted. Yes, the two often go hand in hand, but just because you’re extroverted doesn’t mean you’re a friend magnet who must have a teeming social life. If your personality rubs people the wrong way, this may not be true. Don’t use “introversion” as your fall-back explanation, is all I’m saying.
I’m guessing there must be some people who know there are positive qualities to being introverted and wish they could be more like that.
I’m the kind of person who can keep you laughing for hours on end, but after 2+ hours, you’ll have no information or impression about me other than “what a funny guy.”
I can mislead you and deflect any inquiries about my personal life effortlessly. Many people in the past nicknamed me “Teflon” because I knew the perfect thing to say to avoid embarrassment.
Sometimes, when I feel depressed, I consider myself “a dancing monkey,” because all I do is make people laugh, but they don’t really know who I am because I don’t let them.
I’m definitely an extrovert. I will interject with jokes at work meetings, I chat to strangers in the queue at the supermarket, I always talk to the girl or guy bagging my stuff. If I am sitting at a table in a food court and I see someone struggling to find an empty table I offer them a seat. When Blackberries were a status symbol at work and anyone with one wore it on their belt, I took to wearing a Fisher-Price Doodle Pro on my belt to mock them.
However I live alone and love being by myself. I have been married and have adult kids but I can’t imagine spending more than 3 days living with another person. I like going out alone, particularly to restaurants and movies, although company is better for musical events.
I don’t know if you are male or female, but we are almost the same person (except that I always feel like a dancing monkey). I too have a fetching sense of humor. In school, I was the class clown (voted Most Humorous my senior year…my most remarkable achievement in life!) Now I’m the person at the staff meeting always ready with the witty one-liner, or the one in the breakroom that has everyone ROTFLMAO.
People mistake this behavior as me being “sociable”, when really it’s a defense mechanism that I learned in high school: If you laugh at yourself first, then people are less likely to poke fun at you. Now I use my funny bone to ward off busybodies. It’s like if I can throw enough peanuts at the crowd, they won’t try to get too close. Unless they dare to feel my wrath.
So I think you’re introverted like me. The person I’m talking about seems to have opposite motivations than what we have. She wants attention. She wants people to ask “What’s going on?” so she can regale them with the wonderful details of her life. She’ll bop into my office when I’m deeply engrossed in my work, just to talk about some mundane story involving her boyfriend. Lord, gag me with a spoon. I’m not an expert, but this seems like very non-introverted behavior. Indeed, if she would just admit that she was an extrovert, then perhaps I could tolerate her better. Instead, it just seems she wants to be something that she’s not, for reasons unknown to me.
I’m definitely in the 4-6 range. My father used to say I could walk into a room of strangers and walk out an hour later with a new group of friends and while that’s true on one level I also need alone time to remain sane. If my schedule starts swinging too far to one extreme I have to bring it back towards centre or I become irritable.
I just spent a wonderful vacation with my husband and 3 other people, but the following week I changed my schedule at the last minute to allow me to work from home on Wednesday to get a break. Not from the work (although damn people) but from the people.
Introvert, probably about a 9. The people at work would be surprised because they think I’m outgoing and funny but they’ve never seen me socially. Inept, socially, that’s me.
I am a 10. I never voluntarily seek out the company of others, and I turn down invitations unless I am absolutely obligated to attend (as I age I have even turned down some obligations, I’m sure my family thinks I’m a crazy-ass hermit). Being around other people is SO DRAINING that I literally need to spend an entire day recovering afterward.
It doesn’t help that all the people I know (entire family, and my one friend) are extroverts. If I could spend time with an introvert, maybe I wouldn’t hate it so much. But extroverts are constantly talking, yakyakyak, gives me a fucking headache. Silence is apparently anathema to them. And they think while talking, whereas I prefer to think before I speak.
