There are a lot of pseudo bullsh*t ways to typecast people. There’s type As and type Bs, there’s jocks and nerds, ­­­­­­­and there’s a**holes and people who have managed to trick people into thinking they’re not an a**hole. These are just names we attribute to people through our own assumptions regardless of their validity, and calling someone introverted or extroverted is just as arbitrary. Just like everything else, your social tolerance is on a spectrum; very few people can say they are one thing or the other.

I’ve been an introvert my entire life. In kindergarten, I refused to say "hi" to friends if I didn’t absolutely have to. If I saw you in passing, there wasn’t a chance in hell that I would acknowledge you. It’s something I still have to force myself to do now. But I’ve also always loved people. In kindergarten, I started a club to help solve people’s problems and spent my recesses conferring with groups of friends and solving the mysteries of the playground and cooties.

So there’s the dilemma. I both love and hate everyone. And for the longest time, for better or worse, I thought that was a trait unique to me. Media really plays one side against the other and it’s rare to see a character balance in the middle, but I’ve found that in reality, us “middle people” (the name is a work in progress) are everywhere. Very few people are actually either afraid of strangers or the life of the party. Most of us are both. I’m not sure if it depends on my mood or the day or the cycles of the moon, but some days I crave company and other days solitude is my drug of choice.

It’s not always easy to play the middle (for me at least). At parties, I find myself reverting into a corner or back room, having to force myself to go back out and have fun, but once I’m out there, my inner extrovert shines. This happens everywhere from the classroom to the gym; introverted people find it much easier to say silent and take an observatory role. It would be a hell of a lot easier for us to stay silent then to exert ourselves, but there’s that sliver of extrovert in us that pulls us out of our shell.

I’m not 100% sure what I’m trying to say with this. I didn’t want this to end up as some unrelenting confession where I lay out my heart hoping for some social understanding, but that’s more and more what its sounding like. Maybe it’s a cop out to admit it (it’s definitely bad writing), but I think there’s a lot of importance in this topic and I’m willing to risk sounding sappy to talk about it.

I guess what I really want to do is ask what is it like to be an extrovert. Do you exist out there somewhere, ensuring that the spotlight is perpetually trained on you, wishing that you can constantly be connected to the people around you? Or is that just a character we've fabricated over time? I can’t picture it, but maybe that’s just because I’m too introverted to have met this person. 

Regardless of my own personal understanding, I want this article to be for your personal understanding. If you’re an introvert like me, try to get out there and trick people into thinking you’re not trapped in your own mind. The world is a lot more fun when you’re a part of it.