TRANSCRIPT
Not infrequently, people have asked me, “Are you an introvert or an extrovert?” and I don’t have a simple answer for that question. Part of why is I feel like I’m both, and I feel like I’m strongly both.
When I think of what it is to be an introvert, to be inside my own mind, to enjoy my reflective process, to like being with myself and to learn from inside of myself, to have a world of my own on the inside that I can find pleasure from, like spending time alone with me, I really identify with that. I feel very strongly that that really does capture a lot of me.
And yet, when I hear about what it means to be an extrovert, to be gregarious, to be outgoing, to enjoy social interaction with others, to learn about life from social interactions with others, to find my energy come up when I’m socially interacting with others, to be expressive, I also strongly identify with that.
So how is it possible? How is it possible to be both introverted and extroverted? Well, for me, the reason that I bring this subject up at all is I think it’s a false dichotomy that people are either introverted or extroverted or that they’re just inherently temperamentally one or the other.
I think the reason for this is, once upon a time when I was younger, I was more on the pole of being introverted, mostly because I didn’t fit in in my world so well. I didn’t fit in in my family so well. I didn’t fit in in my school environment. So, I’ll often, especially in larger groups of people, I didn’t feel comfortable. It didn’t feel like me. So I was much safer having my relationship with me, my quiet time with me, my self-reflective process, maybe having a couple of friends or maybe even one friend who I did a lot of stuff with privately, a person who could enter my inner world. But out in the world, being gregarious, I wasn’t particularly popular at all.
But what I really found, the more I resolved my traumas, the more I got over a lot of my deeper insecurities and resolved them and became more of an integrated person, the more I did feel comfortable in the world. The more I wasn’t scared of being criticized or attacked, I didn’t worry so much about my emotional vulnerability because, in a way, I was less vulnerable. I was more strong.
However, I still loved my interactive time with myself, in my own mind, my introspective self-reflective process. So what I found also in watching myself develop into someone who was more introverted and extroverted, or who could jump back and forth between the two, or especially in my more extroverted moments, extroverted times in my life, I could actually simultaneously also be introverted. I could be very self-reflective and have a whole private world within myself in the midst of a social environment where I was also being extroverted.
Well, what I discovered by watching this process inside myself, watching myself develop into somebody who was both, I realized that quite a lot of the people who I knew who I would have once-upon-a-time labeled as extroverted, I realized that they actually were kind of like fake extroverts. They were outgoing, they were gregarious, they shared a lot about themselves, but really it was kind of an act. It was like they were projecting an image of themselves, making themselves seem bigger than they were. But underneath that, they were just scared little people. I saw that again and again and again, and they were actually very vulnerable on the inside. They were scared of their inner world, so they were putting out an image that they were very, very extroverted.
So that then made me question, are they not extroverted? Are they actually really introverted? And yet, when I watched them, I realized they didn’t have much of a self-reflective internal relationship at all. They really watched, wasn’t much going on there on the inside, especially when I talked to them in a more personal and private way. And then I realized a lot of these people who were so-called extroverts, they’re not extroverts and they’re not introverts. They’re kind of neither of these things.
And then I see other people who are supposedly labeled as introverts. They’re clearly not extroverts. They’re not putting themselves out there. They’re not putting much out into the world in a social way, but they’re called introverts. And when I thought of some of them, actually didn’t seem to have so much of a profoundly deep self-reflective relationship with their own selves and actually more like they were just kind of shut down. And yet they got labeled as introverted because they were kind of withdrawn from the world. So what were they? I think sometimes, I think they were kind of neither also.
And so for me and myself, thinking now that I’m kind of both, I think this may touch on something more universal. Some of the people who I know who are the most seriously extroverted people, in terms of really being able to put their internal self out there into the world publicly, friendship-wise, gregariously, socially, are also simultaneously some of the most introverted people in terms of the strength, the core of their deep inside relationship with themselves.
And the same thing goes with some of the people who are the most introverted people, really in terms of their relationship with themselves. They have the greatest ability to transfer that into their relationship with the outside world. So the idea that people are specifically one or another, I don’t necessarily buy that. I think that’s often just kind of a surface view of things.