I read this article from HuffPo today, and it really got me thinking.

In the article, the author talks about how for a long time, she thought she was an extrovert, but then felt ashamed of her desire for copious amounts of alone time. How she hates going to social events, and would rather be home reading or puttering around the house or cuddling her dog.

She didn’t realize she was an introvert. She thought she was an extrovert who hated people. And something in her reluctance to accept that she was an introvert really resonated with me and my issues.

For me, the evidence is clear. I am an introvert. Social time drains me, even when I am enjoying myself. I don’t know how to mingle and, to be honest, that word makes me intensely uncomfortable. I like working by myself and hate the idea of having to collaborate. I am quite happy in my own little world most of the time. I don’t feel the need for a lot of social stimulation. I am definitely the sort of person who wants a small number of close friends rather than numerous shallow friends. In fact, to be honest, I think it is impossible to have more than five or six real friends. The rest are just acquaintance. There is only so much friendship any one person can generate.

I don’t want to chat with taxi drivers, servers, cashiers, or other random people. I don’t want the manager of the restaurant to recognize me and sit down and strike up a conversation. I don’t like bright, noisy environments and would rather be where it is medium dark and quiet so I can hear myself think. When the masses go one way, I invariably go the other. I am an edge of the herd dweller.

The fact that I love good conversation more than nearly anything else in this good green world and that I am a loving and caring person doesn’t change the diagnosis one iota. I am an introvert, period.

But I don’t want to be. And that is the problem.

I want to be an open, friendly, adaptable person who can go anywhere and fit in and be totally comfortable. I want to be approachable and kindly and understanding. I want to be vibrant and dynamic and charming and just plain a wonderful person to be around. I want to make people happy just by being around. I want to be fun and funny and fantastic.

I want to be Fruvous.

And sometimes I am. But only in a virtual text-based environment. Because I am a furry and spend a lot of time pretending to be an idealized version of myself free of my issues and inhibitions, I have created and preserved a version of myself that is, in many ways, radically different than the real thing.

And that means I never have to face the issue of who I really am. And it means that I have, in a sense, a bifurcated personality. Some things I express in the real world. Others I express as my other self. Both are expressions of who I really am, but one is real and one is fictional, and I am starting to think that it might be time to end the masquerade and see what’s under my mask.

The thing is, I am ashamed of my real self. And my medical diagnoses has helped underscore that shame. I can lump all the introverted things about myself under the umbrella of “social anxiety” and treat them as pathological, and not actually “me” at all.

And it keeps alive the idea that somehow, someday I will heal and grow and recover, and then I will be the idealized version of myself, and everything will be wonderful.

And in the meantime, I can continue to be ashamed of my “antisocial” tendencies. And I can continue to feel weird and guilty when I “admit” to being an introvert, despite all the evidence. It’s like somewhere deep down, I feel like being introverted means being a cold, hostile, bitterly defensive hermit, and that’s the opposite of who I want to be.

Even worse, it’s the opposite of how I see myself.

No really, the fictional version of me that I pretend to me online is the real me! Surely there’s nothing wrong with that, right? I’m not really the emotionally cramped and constipated guy who is only comfortable in academic situations who can spend an entire day completely alone and only start feeling lonely somewhere around midnight. I’m not really the cerebral cripple who hides from the light.

No, I am the open, friendly, hilarious, adorable version of myself who easily approaches strangers and who radiates warmth and wit and wonder.

You know, the version who’s a fox. From space.

The real issue is the guilt and shame. That is what is keeping me from fully accepting that I am an introvert, full stop, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It doesn’t mean I am cold or mean or sour. It doesn’t mean I am hostile and defensive and bad to be around.

I can be both a nice person and an introvert.

I just need to dream up a new version of myself that includes that idea. I am a quiet, bookish, introverted, gentle, sensitive person who is a very sweet fellow.

But the thing is, there is still another side of me that is a big, bold, obnoxious fellow who wants to live large without holding back.

I have so many sides to my personality. It’s crazy. No wonder I have always felt like a five dimensional peg in a world full of two dimensional holes. Three if you’re lucky.

Still, I know what comes next, at least. Make peace with my introversion. Uninstall the notion that introvert = bad person. Open myself up to drawing boundaries to keep myself safe. Maybe then I can feel more comfortable going out in the world.

Because now, I have my armor on.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Anyone remember what show that line is from? I remember it from some show where there were people who lived underground and their exit to the surface was on some vaguely Gunsmoke-esque ranch.

Of course, that might be a near total distortion of what the show was actually about. These are some very old memories formed when I was very young.

And of course, it’s entirely possible that the phrase originated on Gunsmoke or Bonanza or any of the dozens of other Wild West shows that used to be as common as crime shows are now.

But what the hell.

Today’s been a good day. Had Psych 1100. Learned neat stuff about memory. At the most basic level, memory is just the tendency of synapses to change in structure if exposed to the same stimulus over and over again. That pathway then becomes optimized. If that goes on, you get a stable pattern that repeats in full when the right synapse is triggered.

In other words, it becomes a memory. Freaky to think it’s something so relatively simple.

I also learned that while memory involves all kind of brain regions (which makes sense when you think of all the things we can remember, like words, sounds, thoughts, ideas….. ), the master index file is the hippocampus. That’s the card catalog (damn I am old) without which the rest of memory is basically useless.

We also learned the story of HM, which is very sad but it made me so made I have to pass it on. Sorry.

HM was a young person who, after a head injury, developed severe epilepsy. As in, 20-50 seizures a day. He couldn’t learn much because the seizures kept him from consolidating memories. He couldn’t make a living, because his seizures could strike at any time. He couldn’t even take care of himself. He was, in short, a very sick man.

Enter Doctor Scoville. He was a neurosurgeon with a reputation as being a real cowboy, always taking risks and trying out new things. And he’s invented a procedure where, by removing one of the two hippocampi in the human brain, he had greatly reduced the frequency of seizures in a number of patients.

But golly gee, HM was REALLY REALLY sick. (Some of you already see where this is going. )

Yup. He took out both hippocampi, leaving poor HM unable to form any new memories because the index file was gone. For the life of me, I can’t picture the man’s reasoning. Did he really think that the hippocampus was just some useless organ like the appendix that you could just get rid of when it breaks? Like Nature and/or God had put them there for no reason? The mind boggles.

But this was in the bad old days of the early Fifties, when doctors were God and nobody ever questioned what they were doing and there was no such thing as an ethics review board.

As a result of that butchery, HM’s long term memory was gone. And he could not form new memories at all. For all we know, memories were being formed in the short term memory, and maybe even being stored all over the brain. But without a hippocampus, his mind could not access them.

As a result of the horror bestowed upon HM, Scoville at least had the decency to be wracked with pain and guilt and dedicated the rest of his life to arguing for the most conservative approach to neurosurgery, and reminding his fellow surgeons to not be such hubris soaked egomaniacs when dealing with actual people’s lives for fuck’s sake.

I might be paraphrasing.

Also today, when I got home, I had a nice long chat with my sister Anne on the phone. She and my sister Catherine are going to see what they can get done in order to cure my financial ills.

Which is wonderful news. But honestly, the best thing about it was the conversation with my sister. I hadn’t talked to her in many many years and it was so good to hear from my brilliant vibrant redheaded sister again. We had a tendency to trip over each other verbally because to be honest, we are both people with a really strong urge to speak, and so not interrupting one another was a real dos-y-dos.

But I loved hearing from her. I honestly should be the one to open the lines of communication more. I have the time, and connecting with my family always makes me feel a whole lot better. Reminds me that there are people out there whom I love deeply and who love me.

And frankly, I need to be reminded about that a LOT. I have a tendency to slip into feeling like nobody cares about me and nobody wants me around. And nobody wants to hear from me. If I contact someone, I will just be interrupting what they are doing and bothering them and they will be sitting there wishing I would just shut the hell up and leave them alone already.

I know that isn’t true. But those tapes run deep. There is a lot of ice separating my heart from the truth, and in many ways I am still that lonely planet that can’t really feel the rays of the sun.

All it can do is shine, shine, shine, and hope someone reflects its own warmth back at it. ^[1]

Also on the Funding Crisis 2015 front, my GoFundMe has attracted $160 of donations from people who are literally, scientifically, and morally the most wonderful people on the face of Planet Earth.

A lot of people will say they care. But when push comes to shove, it’s the people who step up and contribute who really count. The people willing to contribute whatever they can to get you out of a jam.

And that means even more to me than the money.

Makes me feel like ol’ George Bailey at the end of It’s A Wonderful Life.

And I can’t possibly thank people enough for that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.