“You don’t talk. It’s the quiet ones you have to watch out for.”
Working on the conveyor belt sorting out small silver spheres that would eventually be shipped to the US to be minted into quarter dollar coins, my workmate’s attack was as vicious and blunt as it was unexpected. Up until then I had quietly been listening to the swirl of chatter bubbling up from the women who were working the belt alongside me. I was floored and didn’t know what to say. Being young and full of vinegar I might have snapped something brief and snarly back but I realised then that quietness was no longer really an option for me in my workplace. I needed to force myself to pretend to be what I really wasn’t: an extrovert, a people-person. I would have to force myself to make small talk and every time I did it, it would be death by a thousand, tiny cuts.
I worked my factory job for a little over a decade and every day I would come home dirty from the grime and sweat of the workday, sometimes physically exhausted from the heavy work. But arguably the heftiest toll was the mental and emotional depletion caused by the constant interaction that the work day obliged. Being quiet and a good listener, bored workmates would sometimes unload onto me, not understanding that my sensitivity led me to feeling almost injured at times by some of the details and things they told me about their private lives. Things I didn’t want to know. I came to my workplace to earn my crust. I wasn’t there to make friends or bond with people and yet it became hard not to care about these people because I knew too much about them not to. Sometimes my supervisor or leading hand would take pity on my exhausted looking self and knowing that I enjoyed solitary work, I would be offered a few hours of solo work but even then they themselves would come into my work space to make desultory chit chat. The only place I found solitude during my working hours was when I locked myself inside a grimy toilet cubicle. For those precious moments I could rest and recharge.
To be an introvert is to be quite misunderstood at times. You are frequently seen as a troublemaker for not integrating better into cultures often dominated and set by the standards of extroverts. Your quietness and strong desire to be left alone is regularly misinterpreted as anger, sullenness, surliness, bitchiness, coldness or superiority. To this day I don’t think some members of my own family accept that I am an introvert with many of the accompanying needs and quirks that being an introvert entails. The only person who really accepts me as I am is B, a fellow introvert. His own friendship group once expressed disbelief at how we can be together all the time but what they don’t understand is how introverts share space: together yet alone. B and I are often wrapped up in our own pursuits, happy to be in each other’s presence but giving each other plenty of space to be. After we have had sufficient “alone” time together, we’ll reconnect and chat about what we’ve read or seen or we’ll binge watch some Netflix. Currently we are watching an amazing series called Fauda. I highly recommend it.
But the truth of the matter is that for the longest time I thought there was something really wrong with me and my lack of socialising. I strongly felt that I needed to have vibrant social outlets in order to be ‘normal’. Thus, I forced myself to do things like cosplay, to participate in community projects in my local neighbourhood and join various online chat groups like Discord. It was all quite terrible at times. I enjoyed some of it but most of the time the overstimulation of the experience meant that I was locked into a cycle of activities that left me feeling exposed, frazzled and drained. It’s been only very recently that I have given myself permission to step into my comfort zone and let the noise and clutter of my social life fall away. I do socialise still but not very much and only with a very small circle that you can count on one hand. Without really intentionally doing so, I discovered my introvert self and saw how beat up and haggard she was and I took her to my heart and said, “enough.”
Part of this process began several years ago when I discovered that I might be HSP: a Highly Sensitive Person through a marvellous TED talk by Elena Herdieckerhoff which I will link here: The gentle power of highly sensitive people. However enlightening this TED talk was for me, the real legitimising framework for feeling comfortable enough to allow myself to be the introvert that I am came from reading The Secret Lives of Introverts: Inside Our Hidden World by Jenn Granneman. It was equal parts comforting and shocking to read my personality traits jumping out of this book. It explained and talked about so much of what I knew about myself in a positive light whereas for most of my adult life, these traits and quirks have persistently been discussed with me and about me in mostly negative terms. I agree with Granneman that sometimes labels can help. In my particular case, calling myself an introvert has been a profound relief because I am no longer just a weirdly unsociable person who may or may not be maladjusted. Instead, I am someone who contributes differently and quietly, in my own way, in my own time and on my terms. It gives me great confidence to frame my personality in this way and by perceiving B as a fellow introvert, I can also understand him better now too.
Blogging is my way of reaching out in the world and I thank every reader who stops by here or the music blog. Blogging allows my inner world to reach outwards. I am so grateful to have a place where I can write and share my thoughts and I look forward to writing again next time.
