I remember where I was the first time that I heard the term introvert. I was in the basement of my church, about 20 minutes north of my small town. It is a little white church on a hill in the literal middle of nowhere; my pastor jokes to this day about the farm fields that surround the place and the isolation that the church’s early Norwegian founders must’ve so admired when they founded the place in 1850.

Generally speaking, a cold February night in the darkened and musty basement of a centuries old church isn’t the ideal place to discover something incredible and unique about yourself. But that’s in fact exactly what happened.

We’ve all heard the dichotomy before; you’re either an introvert or an extrovert. You’re either the person throwing the party or the guy standing in the corner, silently bobbing along to the music. You’re either the kind of person that introduces yourself to people or the kind who waits to get introduced. The kind that feels most at home up on stage or the one who’d much rather be home reading a book.

I had never had a word for my reticence before, except for maybe “shy” which I don’t think quite completely encompasses what it means to be an introvert. Because I’m not shy in the sense that I didn’t like people. I love people. But I don’t always love being around people, if that makes sense. The idea of people fascinates me. Their behavior, their movement, how they interact with one another and their environment. However, I don’t always appreciate being involved in those interactions.

How my youth pastor described it that night was in the prototypical standing-by-the-punch vs. in-the-middle-of-the-dance-floor kind of attitude. I didn’t mind the simplistic explanation because at the time I had no idea that such a division even existed.

Yet, at the same time I had the feeling that it didn’t entirely explain me as a person. I definitely was never the most outgoing kid in school or in any social construct. I wasn’t the most popular and I didn’t have the most friends (if those things can be used as markers for extroverted-ness). But I liked to speak and I liked to act. I loved putting myself out there on a stage and trying to imitate something I wasn’t. And I could be witty when I wanted to be. I was, after all, the awkward, nerdy kid who in the 7^th grade had whipped the class into a frenzy and won a spot on the student council on the back of a 5-minute speech I had made up on the fly and injected with some well-timed humor.

Those weren’t introverted properties, were they?

According to Merriam-Webster, an introvert is a shy person, or someone who doesn’t find it easy to talk to other people. Which could explain me some of the time, but not 100% of the time. Talking to people is plenty easy. Figuring out what exactly to say is a whole ‘nother ballpark. See, I’m the kind of person who loves a good conversation, but it has to be just that: a conversation. Small talk is boring. The typical pleasantries that we as Americans normally swap with one another (“Hi, how are you?”/“Good”/“Good”) are stale and not very conductive to good communication. It doesn’t say much about a person other than that they’ve memorized enough social niceties to get them through the day.

So I never had a way to balance this juxtaposition of my extroverted and introverted self. Not until I took the Myers & Briggs personality test that is.

The result of the test showed that I was an INFP (introverted, intuitive, feeling, perceptive) personality type. But even more than that, it broke down in a percentage format how much I aligned with each of those letters and their opposites. I scored a 62% on the introverted portion, leaving 38% for extraversion.

I was floored. I was ecstatic. I mean that sounded about right; a rough 60-40 split between my reserved and outgoing self. A little more towards that awkward guy in shuffling around at the edge of the party, but also a part that wouldn’t mind to have the limelight, if only for a short while. It looked as if I had a more definite answer to what I had come across all those years ago in that dusty church basement.

What the Myers & Briggs personality test allowed for me to realize was the fluidity of one’s character. I can be both introverted and extraverted. I can be both intuitive and observant. I can be opposite things at all different times, not because I’m confused, but because different people react differently in different situations. And the only thing that makes me is unique.