Dear Extroverted People,

I’m an introvert. But amongst introverts, I’m a bit of an extrovert, so I thought I would take it upon myself to address you and try, in my own way, to bridge the gap.

I know you don’t understand us. Not really. You have to take it on faith that we are how we are, so very different from you, and accept that we live by different rules and have different needs, and we greatly appreciate the consideration you give us in that respect because we know you can’t truly identify with it.

And I know that when you do try to understand introversion, it seems kind of awful to you. It seems like there is something wrong with us, that we are sad people afraid of life, and part of you wants to cheer us up and gets us to come out of our shell.

And the truth is, some of us could really stand to be brought out of ourselves a little. But it can’t be done by force. You can’t drag us out into the light because we will just scurry back into our comforting darkness and cling to it all the harder in the future, and never trust you again because you are not “safe”.

To us, it is a loud, bright, upsetting world, and we treasure our retreats from the noise and hustle because it is only when we can escape overstimulation (and our comfortable stimulation level is much lower than yours) that we can be calm, relax, and recharge our social batteries by drawing strength from our highly developed interior lives.

It is those interior lives that let us understand you a little better than you understand us. We can understand, at least in the abstract, how you thrive on stimulation and excitement, and take your strength from the world instead of your own inner resources. You don’t have batteries that need recharging when they are spent. You take your energy directly from the environment, like a solar calculator, so you naturally seek environments full of energy and stimulation where you feel alive and happy. It makes total sense from your point of view.

But we don’t work that way. I know that it is hard for you to understand, but we can be perfectly happy alone with a book. We are not lonely and sad. We sincerely enjoy being alone because that is when we feel calm and safe. If you give us the space and time to recharge, and thus let us feel safe around you, you will find we can come out of our shells and be sociable with you and you will reap the rewards of connecting with a thoughtful, intelligent person with a point of view quite different from your own that can be a source of much interesting conversation, not to mention our emotional depth.

The trick is, you have to be very patient with us, and I know that is not easy for you. We are not very stimulating to be around when we don’t feel safe, and so it is hard for you to be patient and not give into your frustration with us. You normally avoid low stimulation situations because they make you depressed and it can be very tempting to just give up on us and go seek a more stimulating companion.

And that’s fine. Nobody said you were morally obligated to draw us out. It is up to you to decide if you are interested enough to take the time to get to know us. If you do not, we will just go back to our happy internal lives.

But if you take the time, we can do each other a lot of good. Us introverts can gain much wisdom on how to embrace live and live in the moment from people like you. You seem so very alive to us that we often envy your freedom of self-expression.

Of course, other times you scare the hell out of us.

No, really. If you remember, we prefer quiet environments because that is where we feel relaxed and calm, so you can imagine what high stimulus environments (or people) does to us. We get very anxious and freaked out, and all we want is to run back to our quiet caves as fast as we can.

So if we seem scared of you, try not to take it too personally. When we don’t feel safe, we can’t view things rationally and sometimes that means we are not being fair to you. We are reacting like the scared animals we are, and we can’t calm down and view things in a more rational, sober light until the fear stimulus (you) is gone.

Therefore, your usual instinct, to just go at a problem until you solve it, is not going to work. It is, in fact, the exact opposite of the correct strategy. You need to just leave us alone for a while, and wait for us to come out of our fear state and maybe even emerge, ever so cautiously, from our caves on our own.

What happens next is vital. You have to make it safe for us to approach you, and build up that trust slowly. We only trust a little at a time, and at any moment we could bolt back into our holes, and so we’re sorry if it seems like we are testing you.

We are, in fact, testing you. Sorry. But it can’t be helped.

So just keep it mellow, and if you pay careful attention, we will give you clues as to the level of stimulation we are ready for. The basic rule is, don’t give back more stimulation than we give you. As we open up and relax, we will naturally raise our output bit by bit until we reach our higher comfort level.

And that is when both extroverts and introverts can get along great together, two halves of the same whole, and we are far stronger together than the sum of all our strengths apart.

That’s all for today folks…. see you later!

Another thing that came up during yesterday’s therapy session is my intensity.

It is another facet of my struggle to understanf just what sort of effect I have on people. I have been lost in the cave of echoes for so long that I just don’t know what my true reflection even looks like any more.

I need to replace the false image I hated for so many years with something more balanced and true.

And part of that larger mission is my effort to make sense of my childhood. It is not news to anyone that I was a very diffifult child. All those brains and sensitivity, without the slightest clue how to be tactful and thus avoid biting the hand that feeds me. Willful and extremely stubborn, effortlessly indepedent of mind and will and hopelessly and patheticly dependent on my teachers for attention, extremely different yet desperate to be liked, to say that I was a handful would be a profound understatement,

I was an entire round of applause-ful.

What I realized yesterday is that I was not just a difficult kid, I was UNIQUELY difficult. In all regards, I was simply off the scale of what most non-specialy teachers could handle. I had the bad luck to be a four dimensional peg in a three diensional hole, and I cannot get too mad about the system just plain not being able to handle me.

Sure, in a perfect world, every school system would be able to handle any student, no matter how unique. But here in the real world, systems are designednbsp; to work for the largest number of people possible, and that is always the middle of the bell curve, not the outliers.

And I am an outlier amongst outliers.

From the point of the view of my teachers and family, I was very difficult to deal with, and very easy to ignore, Dealing with me meant fielding my way out of left field questions, dealing with my obvious kicked-dog neediness, and enduring the high wattage spotlight of my attention.

That last bit is what I mean by my intensity. The thing about being very bright is that you are hard on the eyes. Dealing with you is like looking directly at a lit lightbulb, especially for people of normal intelligence.

Whereas ignoring you not only spares people all that, but also incurs no penalty. It is not like by ignoring you, people have to deal with you acting out, or pestering for attention, or anything else.

And all it takes is the slightest hint of rejection, and I will go away and stop bothering you. It is the ultimate in convenience. A self-disposing child.

I was hard to take but easy to ignore.

Explains a lot, really.

See you tomorrow, folks.