At some point in our lives, we’ve all been curious as to who we are or where we fall on the personality scale. Whether it is a personality questionnaire or a casual question we’ve always been expected to have a definite answer and sometimes we do have the answer ready, but over time you are assigned to this box where you no longer feel like you belong over time.
As a young girl, I was “that” type of kid, the type of kid who would not stop talking, who would jump into the arms of a stranger without hesitation. I was put into the social butterfly box that early on and never had a chance to explore the other side. I was the one who was expected to, the one who was supposed to make conversations during family functions or during complicated situations because apparently, I was the one who “talked”. This extended to school and instead of my family, the standards here were set by friends.
I found myself at home in this box of mine for a long time until I started to change until I decided to remain silent at times and keep to myself when I felt like it. Surprisingly enough, this change brought more discomfort to the people around me than to me. All of a sudden my silence was being compared to arrogance, compared to disrespect, something that was unacceptable. It seemed as though my thoughts and behaviors did not lie in my hands but in the hands of the environment surrounding me.
“You’ve changed”, “you used to be friendly” were just some of the many remarks I got frequently and on days where I was my “old” self, everyone felt at peace and rejoiced at my “extrovertedness”.
College was a new environment, where nobody saw me as the kid who jumped into the laps of strangers, but they saw me as someone completely different. For the first time, I was immediately put into a box that was unfamiliar and new, I became the wallflower, the one who preferred to listen not talk. For a while, I was happy, because I got to experience a label that was fresh.
However, gradually that feeling of misplacement returned when I was not allowed to be my young self when everyone had already decided who I was and ripped me off of the opportunity to something more than a wallflower, something that I once was.
Personality, I’ve come to realize is a spectrum, where one can be placed anywhere and one that does not have to be concrete. There are days when you might feel like going out of your way to talk to people or some days where you just wish to spend time with yourself.
This choice should lie in your hands and no one else’s because when the choice is made by others, you become powerless, you become complacent to their desires and expectations. Most days I find myself somewhere in the middle of this spectrum and I’ve learnt to find peace with the fact that my personality is not definite because it is not supposed to be and so does not have to be yours.
