I wasn’t always a shy person. As a kid, I never stopped talking and was often the lead in school plays, but then puberty hit and it’s like my polarity reversed. I became the girl who sat and read a book during recess when she wasn’t using the time to get ahead on her homework.
In my defense: I wasn’t “brown-nosing,” but it was actually an early sign of my natural inclination toward efficiency. If I did the homework at recess, it meant I didn’t actually have to do anything at home.
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Which meant I had all evening to play video games and read and write my own fantasy stories.
Of course, I didn’t really understand the logic behind my actions yet, and kids just thought I was being a teachers’ pet.
(Can we all agree that doing your homework isn’t sucking up to the teacher? Like, there was no extra credit here. I was completing the bare minimum of work expected of all the students.)
Teachers just saw me as “shy” and the recess supervisors would constantly try to force me to engage with my “friends.”
And that’s when I was first introduced to the idea of the “extrovert ideal,” though I didn’t know the correct terminology yet.
I just internalized the idea that being the quiet one, the one happy to be left by herself, made me less-than.
It wasn’t until late-high school when I started to understand that being quiet and thoughtful wasn’t a flaw, but an advantage. In college, the chance to meet new peers allowed me to encounter the wide variety of people on the introvert-extrovert spectrum.
My place will never be at the front of the crowd or as the life of the party.
But now, instead of thinking that shyness makes me somehow wrong, I know that it just makes me me . When I’m standing to the side at a party, I’m not waiting for a friendly extrovert to pull me onto the dance floor.
I’m waiting for the other introverts to find me so that we can find a comfy corner to chat, debate, and laugh in the way we most enjoy ourselves.
