As I'm suffering from Introversion...

This is more of an intro post, the justification for my claim to introversion. There aren't any guidelines as such. It's only meant to resonate with you, my friend. You are not alone!

As a child I was always the ‘quiet kid’. Though my teacher for Class 1, the lovely Ms.Agnes Horne, had a few other adjectives in store for me: ‘sincere’, ‘responsible’, ‘studious’, ‘hard-working’ and of course ‘quiet’. But the ‘quiet’ part dominated almost every other nice trait I earned.

While in Class 3, they introduced this new kind of report card that had 2 pages dedicated to ‘Personality Development’ that listed various essential qualities and a column where the teacher would remark as to how the kid fared. And I knew that was the harbinger of my doom! Starting then, every quarter, for the next several years, you would find an ‘Average’ against things like ‘Taking Initiative’, ‘Interaction in Class’ and ‘Leadership Qualities’. Neither did I nor my mother found that alarming. I was happy with an ‘Average’ as long as it was not included for the final grades-that’s all that mattered then. But I was a little sad at the same time because in spite of the diminutive amount of importance that I attached to this whole personality development thingy, seeing an ‘average’ was demoralising in more ways than one that too being a topper and all. So my mother would console me saying that I was a quiet child and it was only a matter of time before I started to excel in those areas as well. She would give me ideas as to how I should ask questions to the teachers when I don’t know something or answer in the class when I know something. And I used to practice in my head as to how I would do that. Sadly, my practice never amounted to any real action!

My social skills were (still are) equally pathetic. Now every class in every school has this set of ‘popular girls’ right? Mine were no exception. I had always wanted to be friends with or in the least be in talking terms with these popular girls. (I wonder why) But as you would have already guessed I did neither! All the same, I did have a few friends and it would be an understatement if I said these were people who knew how to handle me! I had my lunches with them, mostly, but preferred having them alone. A little digression is due here. You know it’s an easy job when you have your lunch alone. You can concentrate on your food and probably reflect on the day’s events or wonder about how the brand new watch of the girl sitting at the next table is totally out of place or drift off to a zillion other data points and still complete the eating ceremony in under 15 minutes. As opposed to what happens when you have it with a group. On the contrary, I enjoy having lunch/dinner with person(s) who I could easily connect to; who like to discuss stuff I’m crazy about and to whom I can voice my hitherto unvoiced opinions and not pass off as ‘weird’ again! I wanted to write a dedicated piece on this one, so am not going into the details now!

Back to where we were, all the while, I did not know that I was an ‘Introvert’. You see these were pre-internet and pre-smart<insert x here> days. So I could not just Google out ‘What is wrong with me if I’m a quiet person?’ and hope to find the answer at least in the 5th page of the results.

Okay! Am sure by this time I might come out strikingly similar to that weird uncle’s kid who comes to stay with this lovable family (also with a kid, but the adorable kind) and who would happen to be the epicenter of some other-worldly supernatural stuff in a typical horror movie. Fear not! I’m harmless, well, most of the time.

See this is what happens, isn’t it? Introverts are considered weird. Why? Because they chose not to talk when the whole world did nothing but talking. On a tangential note, did you know that talking expends more energy than you can imagine thereby wear you out faster? Anyway this article on Psychology Today bears out the differences between this weirdness and normalcy succinctly. To quote a few lines:

As it turns out, the brains of introverts and extroverts are wired differently! The front part of introvert’s brains are most active and stimulated by solitary activities while the back part of extrovert’s brains are most active. This part of the brain is stimulated by sensory events coming in from the external world! In addition, a chemical called “dopamine” is released by our brains whenever we experience something positive. It’s an automatic reward center and makes us feel good! Extroverts need more dopamine to feel an effect, whereas introverts have a low dopamine threshold. They don’t require a lot of stimulation to feel rewarded.

My tryst with introversion is a daily affair and cannot be crammed into a single post. There are numerous other inside details that I would like the world to know: like the completely bizarre thoughts that go on in an introvert’s mind even in the most mundane situation, or how we struggle to find our passion and find solace in it once we discover it, or how loads of otherwise ‘important’ stuff doesn’t matter to us at all, or how after all the psychological distress we are subjected to - being treated as the ‘weird kid’ - we embrace introversion whole heartedly and wonder in amusement how normal people are totally weird!

So am going to be introverting every now and then providing you a first hand account of everything that I mentioned above and a lot more. With that I take leave for now.

-Chella