I will admit I was a shy kid. For most of my childhood, one phrase, in particular, haunted me. The phrase my parents heard constantly from my elementary school teachers was that I needed to “come out of my shell.” Yet, the older I got and the more of what I thought of as what my teachers called my “shyness,” the less the criticism made sense to me. Sure, at one point it was difficult for me to share the ideas I had, but once I overcame that difficulty I still heard the same phrase: I needed to “come out of my shell.”
It felt like I was expected to do things that weren’t necessary. I didn’t want to have to speak without having anything substantive to say, I didn’t want to have attention with no real thought around it, I didn’t want to be a part of something that I wasn’t going to be productive in. And I kept on being told that my shyness was the problem, that one day I would overcome it, that the real me is showing glimmers to shining through but he still needs to break out. It was always someone else who had a problem with it, and it always leads me to second guess myself.
Then I took the MBTI. In case you’ve never had an AP Psych class or an Internship that has made you take it, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is a questionnaire that categorizes a taker’s personality by placing them on one side of 4 psychological dichotomies. One of these dichotomies is between the extrovert and the introvert, and the questionnaire assigned me the latter. After reading the analysis of what it means to be assigned as an introvert, I felt the validation of my skepticism of my “shyness.”
C.G Jung, the psychologist known for coining the concepts introversion and extraversion and from whom Myers and Briggs borrowed their definitions for these concepts, differentiates the two between the way a person prefers to get and utilize their energy. Simply the extrovert is energized by active social involvement and interaction while the introvert is energized by inner-reflection. That’s not to say extroverts are always the life of the party and introverts are always wallflowers, and even less so to say extroverts don’t enjoy quiet reading time and introverts don’t enjoy being on the dance floor.
Like many ideas conventionally thought to exist in binaries, introversion and extroversion exist on a spectrum. You wouldn’t describe a zebra solely colored black or solely colored white. Instead, you would call them some combination of two, like white with black stripes, depending on the zebra and your perspective. The same can be said of introversion and extroversion. I like to think of myself as an introvert with extroverted qualities. If I have the energy and the interest to spare, I’ll be actively involved. I’ll like being around people and want to meet and know a wide group of people, qualities that Jung, Myers, and Briggs assign to extroverts. Some of my favorite activities and memories are and have been when I’ve been out and about, acting in a way that can be described as extroverted.
Yet, as much as I know a lot of people, I prefer to know only a few people well (and only have a few people know me well). To me, there is a clear distinction between friends and good friends, and it’s vitally important for me to have that separation. I can be a “people-person” but I would rather describe myself as a “person-person.” I like keeping my own thoughts and ideas to myself until I polish and perfect them, giving myself the preparation to share them with the world and know I’ve done as good a job as I could. And at the end of the day, my version of unwinding is being alone in my room with a hot cup of tea and a novel, and that gives me energy. This is what makes me an introvert at heart.
I am a proud introvert. And I’m bothered by the fact that, in the eyes of many, being introverted and being shy is the same thing; in fact, if you google the definition of “introvert”, Google will tell you that it means to be a “shy, reticent person.” Yet the way I and many of my friends identify as an introvert don’t align with its conventional connotations. I believe it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what introversion if when it is associated with being a “brooder” or even a “narcissist,” as Thesarus.com lists as synonyms.
Introverts live in a world where extroverts are often the first and loudest voice. Expectations and existing judgments only fuel this, as an uplifting speech is more likely to leave a lasting impact on a person than a piece of writing espousing the same ideas. Yet we live in a world that is greatly blurring the line between introverted and extroverted behavior, as we interact both actively and passively on social media from the solitude of our own homes. And we live in a world where there seems to be an even greater nuance to the understanding of introversion, as President Obama is even noted to be an introvert himself. So introverts, don’t be afraid to keep your shell. You will need to emerge from it once in awhile, may, even more, to do great things, but you’ll need it to keep it just as much.
