I've never really believed in a person being fully extroverted, or fully introverted, but if I had to label myself, I would do so with the latter.
But then again, there are parts of me that display the opposite.
It's hard to explain to someone who knows you as the person that never leaves her room that you love to sing and dance like a fool, but not all the time and not around every person. Or that you love being around people, but only when you’re not tired or hungry or in a bad mood.
Does that even make sense? Probably not. I can't even explain it myself, so I don't expect everyone to understand that while I politely decline every invitation to go out while I'm at school, I went to Ireland for a week and a half and was at the pubs every night.
Even after 20 years, I still don’t know if it’s a mood thing or the people I'm around; essentially, you never know what you're going to get with me -- I never know what I’m going to get with me. I could go without talking for three days straight and then decide halfway through a sentence that I don’t want to talk anymore. And I’ll do the opposite. I’ll go to a concert and strike up a conversation with a stranger, but I only have a small handful of close friends, and another handful of regular friends. I love working with and being around people, but I also love retiring to my room at 7 p.m. to read or watch Netflix until it's time to go to sleep.
I’ll act a little goofy on any given day and everyone and their mother will comment on my unusual good mood, but it’s not like I can easily tell them that I was just as happy as I was yesterday when I was in my room watching stand-up comedy and eating Chipotle alone. But it’s true -- there are some days where I will read for seven hours straight (no joke), and others where I will sit in the living room all day because I miss my roommates and I want to see them. And not because I haven’t seen them in a while, either. I’ll just miss them.
My life is like one of those really confusing math problems where you’re given a pattern and you have to try to guess the next sequence based on the previous one, but for the life of you, you can’t. Except I’m pretty sure in my case, there isn’t even a pattern at all (and honestly, I think that about those math problems sometimes, too).
There’s a reason I’m an editor (other than the fact that I hate those stupid pattern problems): I’m better at fixing or adding on to what other people say than I am at saying it myself. But, obviously, once a week or so I conjure up 500 to 1,000 words of my own, and they don’t sound all that bad. Do you see what I mean?
I wouldn't by any means call myself an extrovert, but I don't think I can classify myself entirely as an introvert, either. I guess I'm an extroverted introvert.
