There was never any question in my mind that I was an introvert by nature, though convincing anyone else of that proved impossible. Growing up, I was theatrical, melodramatic, loud, inquisitive—a little girl who stood up and said, “Let me do it.” From the moment I first uttered the word, I lived by the gospel that “No.” was a complete sentence. Even as a very small child I held strong convictions and an inner sense of justice that didn’t exactly make me popular with my peers: I held myself, and consequently everyone else, to very high standards of performance. If I did wrong, I expected punishment. If I witnessed someone else doing wrong, I wanted to witness justice being served. I very much wanted to live in that kind of world. As I grew up, I suffered innumerable existential crises when faced with the reality that the world is anything but just.

Year after year, I got up on stage and entertained. I seemed to have a natural ability as an entertainer, and could perform comedy and drama in equal measure. I was just as likely to make someone laugh as I was to reduce them to tears. I seemed, as they say, “at home” on stage. I suffered no trace of “stage fright” and never had trouble speaking in front of a group. It seemed that right from the get-go I was about as extroverted as they come; and for this, I was praised and rewarded consistently. Each time I performed, got a laugh, received applause, it was reaffirmed for me that this is what people want.

Very much, it seemed, to be successful one had to be visible.

This was the beginning of a lifetime of confusion about who I really was. When I was alone, away from schoolmates, teachers and an audience, I felt an inner sense of peace that I think, in the early years, I confused with boredom. I resisted this “calm” because, since I wasn’t getting rewarded for it, I assumed taking any pleasure in it meant I was “lazy” or “under- achieving” or worse yet, “invisible.” It was difficult for me to accept that that inner sense of peace, and belonging in myself, was the greatest gift I would ever be given in life. And it took many years to understand that.

In the meantime, I grew up. That plucky, loud and often odd little girl with stringy, straight brown hair, perpetually crooked bangs and an answer for everything matured into a desperately confused teenager; during those years there was a nagging sense that the person I had become, the reputation I held, was missing a great truth. I tried to find that missing piece by dyeing my hair, wearing all nature and style of clothing, taking on new belief systems with each breath and proclaiming “This is who I really am” with each new change in the seasons. I was sure, each time, that I had come into myself at last. But the years passed and my body changed but my mind stayed the same; I very much grew to hate it. I continued to deprive myself the peace of mind associated with solitary pursuits because I was ashamed. To be successful, I had to be visible. So, as much as I wanted time to just be alone, to read and write and do the types of quiet things that made my heart beat slowly instead of filling me with anxiety and the rush-rush-rush of achievement — I couldn’t stop performing. Not just on stage, but in every waking moment of my life.

Even though I was consistently rewarded for performing, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t worth the pulsing anxiety that welled up inside me whenever I had to show up somewhere.

I have vivid memories of a child of being taken to dance classes, rehearsals for plays, Girl Scout meetings and any number of after-school extra-curricular activities. I felt stressed enough just spending a day in a classroom that was always 1) too loud 2) too bright and 3) frequently boring that having to do something else before I could go home made my stomach flutter with anxiety. I was always coming up with reasons not to do things, because really I just wanted to be home, shut in my bedroom, reading or writing. I really didn’t want to spend any more time in the world, but I felt that it was expected of me. I should say, though, that this arbitrary expectation was just that, arbitrary. It didn’t come from my family at all. In fact, my mother, father and brother are all introverts as far as I can tell. My younger brother has Autism, and, in fact, probably could understand my plight better than the majority of my peers. My father is a hard worker who is also quiet by nature, not feeling the need to announce his presence in social situations and has always been content to sit back and observe. And all my memories of my mother are of her voraciously reading—she could devour at least four books a week — and she very infrequently left the house, primarily for health reasons but frankly, she never seemed to be troubled by living a very quiet life. I can’t imagine it was easy for any of them to live with a child who was convinced that being extroverted was the only way to survive, when clearly it went against her very nature. But that was how I lived for the majority of my life. Until, that is, I was forced to change.

When I was a sophomore in college, my post-secondary education came to an end just as abruptly as it began: I was sick with a mysterious ailment that made me question how I had been living my life for the last twenty years. Forced to lose everything I worked so hard for—and that pathological extroversion had awarded me—I returned to my hometown with nothing.

Becoming extremely ill physically teaches you a lot about your true nature; I learned very quickly that being around other people generally did not make me feel good. I wanted to see people in small doses, with a very specific goal for the time spent. I didn’t really enjoy small talk, but I was certainly aware of its social purpose and could engage in it readily when the benefits were obvious. I was literally fatigued by being around large groups of strangers whose high energy would fall upon my shoulders like a wet blanket; smothered by their very existence I felt powerless to remove it, and thus, remove myself from some social situation that would validate my existence on earth. Being on stage, performing, or otherwise being vulnerable in front of a group was still something I engaged in, even during my sickest months, because it was the only thing that I knew how to do. It was a skill set that I had mastered and quite frankly, I was good at it. It had become easy, something that I could slip on and off like a pair of gloves. The problem was, I no longer felt the same about visibility; maybe it was because I was more vulnerable than I’d ever been in my life, or I was just physically exhausted, but for the first time the promise of being accepted was not worth the spiritual demands of performing. So, I slowly let it slip through my fingers, drip by drip that part of myself, the one thing I truly identified with, was washed from my skin; what it revealed beneath was a shaking, naked, vulnerable girl who I hated at first sight.

The thing no one tells you about introversion is that the more you ignore it, the tighter its hold on you becomes. On the other hand, no one tells you that forcing yourself to be an extrovert when you are not can be spiritually fatal.

I had reached a point in my life where just to make it through a physically pain-filled day, I had to be very honest with myself about what truly brought me happiness, what gave me peace of mind. The answer was not what I wanted to hear, but I no longer had the energy to ignore it.

I liked stillness. I liked to drive to big, empty places that made me feel small. I enjoyed spending a good fifteen minutes examining all the angles in which light passed through a window. I wanted to write about it, about everything. As a child I could spend hours alone in my room crafting words. It was never something I did for anyone but myself, though a small child with a vocabulary as big as mine didn’t go unnoticed; I was labeled “precocious” and it was left at that. Had I lived in a different community with different schools, I may have been placed in some kind of Gifted and Talented Program, but that would have unnerved me.

I didn’t want to be special, I just wanted to be left alone—but not forgotten.

I spent a solid two years after I got sick trying to accept who I really was. Although my illness was purely physical, an internal infection that roared within me and quietly destroyed my body for years, what it forced me to do was take time to “get real” about what brought me joy- and what kind of life I would appreciate most. In some ways, becoming physically bound to pain for those years was probably the best thing that ever happened to me; it forced me to let go. Because that’s what it would have taken to force me to open my hands and let the lies be free.

I don’t think it’s ever easy to be an introvert in this world we live in; the qualities we exhibit and the things in which we find intense pleasure are not what society values: if we appear quiet and thoughtful, we are seen as cold and unapproachable or maybe even disconnected and unintelligent. If we avoid social gatherings, we’re shy or antisocial — maybe even pathologically so. If we like to listen, we’re not “putting ourselves out there” enough. If we do talk, we either don’t say enough or we say too much, and the intensity either way unnerves people. So, we’re quietly damned if we do, damned if we don’t. Valuing solitude is almost comically misunderstood — sometimes I feel like people associate it with serial killers or mad geniuses who are trying to hide something horrible from the world— I have grown to hate the suspicion that accompanies commentary about my preference to spend time on my own, away from others. If it’s not seen as odd and potentially murderous, it’s just regarded as selfishness and self-involvement. Well, maybe that’s true, if being true to yourself makes you selfish.

In a way, we’re all selfish in the sense that we are mostly ourselves, “self-ish” but we are also wearing the bits and pieces of what other people ascribe to us. Like patchwork, we constantly sport our truth sewn together with what other people want to see. But if we rip apart the seams and vow to just show ourselves, then suddenly we are too much ourselves for other people’s comfort. When we are seen completely for who we are, disregarding what other people would like us to be, then we’re too self involved, arrogant, unconcerned with others. Well, sometimes that’s a good thing. Not letting other people define who you are is the truest freedom a human being can ever know.

I had an MRI of my brain once. Part of the diagnostic journey I embarked on that eventually brought to light my introversion. When I saw my brain on screen for the first time, it gave me the most intense inner peace I had ever experienced. There I was, all of me, the truth and the lies buried in electric flesh.

I am comfortable now. Though it took years, the acceptance did come. I also am thankful for the forced extroversion because it afforded me some wonderful opportunities, it exposed me to a life that had I not lived in it, I’m sure I would have wondered about. Spending the first part of my life fighting my true nature has perhaps given me the privilege of living the majority of my life going forward being comfortable in my own skin.

No one is wholly introverted or extroverted; we’re all a bit Jekyll/Hyde when it comes to this spectrum and that’s what makes humans so fascinating. All of us, with our varying degrees, I do believe possess an innate sense of which one holds more “truth” — but since we live in a society that appreciates and honors the extrovert, if that isn’t our truth we may spend years living shamefully, trying very hard to change these aspects of our personality that are deficient. We see reports in the media about individuals who commit unfathomable acts of cruelty, and people say, “He was quiet, spent a lot of time by himself, was smart but didn’t socialize much” and suddenly the introverts of the world are Public Enemy #1; if we’re not sharing our thoughts all the time, they must be bad ones. If we aren’t constantly engaging with other people, we must be hiding something. If we aren’t proclaiming constantly, “This is who I am, this is what I have, pay attention” then we must be trying to deflect attention away from ourselves lest anyone discover all the eroded skeletons in our closet.

But to be an introvert is far more complex than one would choose to make it; it’s not that we enjoy solitude, it’s that we need it. We experience the world as, at times, a very aggresive place, with far more to give to us than we can take in as it’s happening. So, we take time away from things to process, to learn, to understand. It’s not that we aren’t smart enough to take it all in at once; quite the contrary: we want, very much, to get it right. So we take our time. We live a little deeper, a little fuller, we just don’t do it as fast as society— which wants it all NOW NOW NOW— would like us to.

If I could go back and tell my younger self one thing, it would be this: You do not need to be seen to be known. You will make more of an impact on people with your written words than you ever will by standing in front of them.

In my adult life, I no longer deny myself quiet pleasures. I think, when we’re young, it’s very hard to understand that we might not be quite who we are. We think, “But here I am, this is me.” — but to know who we are we must understand, equally, who we are not. We have to identify as intensely with what makes us unhappy as what brings us joy. Only life can show you that dissonance, only experience widens that gap. Truly, there is no amount of self analysis that could bring about that kind of understanding.

I learned a lot about my true nature because I was faced with a crisis that essentially ripped from me everything I had ever known. It showed me that no matter how hard you work, it doesn’t make you immune to losing it all in a moment.

It showed me that true strength is not withstanding the storm, but being able to rebuild once it passes.

And in order to do that, you don’t have to be frantic. You don’t have to stand amidst the rubble and scream. In my former life, that’s what I would have done. I would have stood there, asking people to see my pain. I would only know it was real if someone told me so. But now, this time, I spent time in the rubble, quietly looking at my surroundings. I was alone. I examined what was left, what could be kept. I pushed aside what could not be saved. I didn’t ask for help at first, I didn’t pull someone in there with me to survey the damage. I just sat inside of it for a while and tried to feel something.

And then, little by little, I quietly began to build my life again.