My search for an identity

Photo by Alex Azabache from Pexels

Up until June of 2019, I had spent my entire life searching for why I felt different from everyone else.   While others liked parties, dances, and campouts, I liked reading alone in my room.  While others enjoyed sports, team video games, and popular TV shows, I preferred to write my own stories and write about my own ideas.  While others enthusiastically spoke of the joy of service, I dreaded dealing with people.  Even what people valued didn’t seem to make sense.  They spent their time trying to make money, win fame, develop relationships, and build things.  They started businesses and debated people online.  They traveled to exotic places.  They ate fancy foods.  They rode roller coasters.  They went to concerts.

I tried to find my place amidst all of these activities.  I studied music, academics, arts, storytelling, and politics.  But I almost never felt right in social settings.  Strangely enough, only school and other highly structured places were comfortable: I knew what I had to do and how I had to do it to be accepted.  But even then, I thought of school instrumentally: the faster I did what was expected, the faster I could go back to my room and be in my head.  This led to awkward family relationships, hesitant and failed attempts at dating, and complete ineptitude in the job market.  I couldn’t relate to people unless I put on a fake persona, couldn’t interact with people unless I froze my face in a plastic expression that left me physically drained, and I couldn’t work anywhere unless someone came to me and offered me a job.
What was wrong with me?

Here were some of my theories over the years:

• I was an alien or an interdimensional traveler who had lost my memory and would someday be discovered by my true people
• I was actually a robot
• I was socially awkward because my parents were socially awkward
• I had schizophrenia
• I was on the autism spectrum
• I was a psychopath
• I had schizoid personality disorder
• I was an introvert

None of these theories quite explained everything.  Being an alien or a humanlike robot was impossible to prove.  Being drained around other people wasn’t just awkwardness, since I still felt it even with people I liked.  I didn’t hear voices.  I felt empathy for people, though more for fictional characters in my head than people in the physical world.  

Schizoid personality was closer than the rest, and it seemed to fit with my withdrawal from people, but it didn’t provide a reason, just a pattern of behavior.  Introvert was the strongest: I became drained around people, I preferred being in my head, I liked structured systems, and I was drawn to abstract ideas, to the point that I was passionate and emotional about characters in stories and concepts in philosophy more often than people, even close family members.

But there was one problem with explaining my challenges by appealing to introversion: it didn’t explain why I had such a hard time in mainstream society.  According to my sources about introversion, such as those following the Myers-Briggs personality types and books about introverts, introverts could learn a few handy tips and cope quite nicely with the extraverted world.  Half or more of the human family were introverts, including presidents, CEOs, actors, public speakers, soldiers, engineers, activists, and fiction authors.  Even my Myers-Briggs personality type had plenty of famous people, famous action heroes, and high-income jobs associated with it.
 
If this was true, then I still had no excuse for feeling so alien, so out of place in this world.  

Then, in the summer of 2019, I decided to read Carl Jung’s 1921 book Psychological Types, the originating text for introversion, extraversion, and what would become personality types.  After I read it, I realized that I did have an explanation.  I really was different.  I was really part of an oppressed population, but one so difficult to see and so silenced in society that even those who talked about the disadvantage of being an introvert hadn’t fully understood the implications.

Now I want to use what I have learned to spark an intellectual movement to better understand type diversity.  I want to educate people about what introversion means and how it relates to the human experience.  I want to better understand my wife and daughter, two introverts who mean so much to me, and write stories with introvert protagonists that will help others understand us better.  I want to critique our social practices and institutions so we can create a more introvert-friendly world.  And I want to discover my own true talents so I can contribute what I was meant to contribute to humanity and find psychological wholeness.

In this blog, I am going to share my thoughts about introverts and our relation to the world.  If you are an introvert or just feel that others misunderstand or don’t appreciate your way of thinking and your talents, then this blog can be a place for you to learn more about your identity and join a community seeking to understand introverts.  I hope you will join me on this journey so we can discover our identities together and discuss what we can do to make the world more friendly to those of all types.  If you are an extravert who cares about introverts, then I hope you will join in the conversation as well.  It will help you understand us better, including those among your friends and family, and help us come together to find practical ways of improving our own corners of the world.  

Welcome to the Type Justice Blog.  My purpose is to join the conversation recently reignited by Susan Cain, Jenn Granneman, and others about the place of introverts in society and how we can make the world more introvert-friendly.  But there will be two distinctive features about this blog that I haven’t found anywhere else online.  One will be my philosophical approach.  As a trained philosopher, I bring a theoretical perspective to the conversation about introverts, including analytical logic as a method to explore claims about introversion.  The other will be the focus on introvert oppression.  I believe that introverts are oppressed, and that no amount of self-help will change our situation unless our cultures and societies change.  I will explore practical ways we can end the oppression of introverts in our families and communities.  

As my last point for this initial post, here are some norms I would like us all to adopt:

• Take a charitable stance.  Being charitable in philosophical discussions means to interpret others’ assertions in the strongest way possible.  To be charitable means to give others the benefit of the doubt, to assume they have good intentions, and to consider the strongest sides of their arguments.  This helps us not only respect each other as thinkers, but also find the widest range of ideas to draw from.
• Pause to check before you post.  This is an introverted strength that I hope all of us can adopt.  It means rereading what you are about to post before you post it, considering the impact of your words, and then adjusting how you present them if needed.  We want to create a community around understanding introverts and finding a solution to introvert oppression, so we need to respect each other.  We need to consider others’ feelings and perspectives whenever we communicate.
• Disagree like a philosopher.  You may have heard the phrase “disagree without being disagreeable” and I think that is a good place to start: expressing a different opinion respectfully.  But beyond that, we also need to disagree philosophically, by explaining our reasons and by expressing our reservations about our positions.  No mortal knows everything, and we all have different perspectives.  Bring ideas up from your perspective, but recognize that different does not always mean contradictory.  I believe that different perspectives can complement one another and help us realize more truth than we had previously thought.
• Be curious and open to wondering.  I want our discussions to lead us on journeys of self-discovery and greater understanding of others around us.  We are here to learn, not to debate, posture, argue, or attack.  Introverts tend to be sensitive to criticism, so those posting on this website will appreciate if all of us show care and respect toward their ideas, even if we do need to maintain philosophical rigor.  Be willing to change your views, since everyone’s views are incomplete, and only through additional learning can we come to greater understanding.
• Set this space apart from the crassness of the Internet, and make it a place for hope and healing.  Introverts—and I’m sure many extraverts as well—frequently find the Internet a coarse, angry, rude, degrading place.  I want this website to be a refuge from all of that.  I want this place to allow the sensitive minds of the world to be free of worrying about vulgarity, profanity, trolling, crudeness, and bullying.  We can all do our part to make the Internet a more civil and compassionate space.

Did anything I mention about my experiences resonate with your own?  Please leave comments below.  I look forward to discussing more with you next week.  At this point, I’m planning to post once a week on this blog, with more content to come on Introvert University as well.

Next week’s topic: What is an introvert?