The world is still bright and loud, yet somehow the dimness in our perception overshadows the noises like a filter. We wish for a quiet hush that would blanket the wild cacophony of screeches and voices on the outside. The world is still bright and loud, and yet we envy the silence. Just for a few hours, maybe a few minutes.
Being introverted means that most social interaction, rather than a catalyst for conversation, is a syphoning drain on our stamina. Extroverts gain energy from social interactions, introverts lose energy. This is not to say that introverts comprise the basement-dwelling breed of reclusive human population. Adventurous human beings come in all shapes, sizes, and personalities. We can run on different batteries, but Introverts run on a shorter charge.
The moment when my battery dies is followed by a rapid onset of withdrawals from my surroundings. It's less of a sudden snapping, but more like a coasting decline into my fortress of solitude. I wish I had a picture that could portray that sentence with justice. The point is that being introverted means that, inevitably, there will be times when I feel like totally disconnecting from my surroundings. It's in the dampened tone of voice, the sullen change in demeanor, the slight alteration in gait that's just a bit too mechanical to feel natural. It's like sending the mind for a nature walk while the body just goes on auto-pilot.
Sometimes these periods of withdrawal are followed by intense bouts with existential questions of faith or identity. All energies focus inwardly. The brain becomes a labyrinth. Countless projections light up, the brain still highly, highly functioning, but the cogwork churns and churns without hints of external debris. Mental gymnastics stymy tides of social interaction. Fireworks blaze, flaring synapses within our skull. Poetically speaking, we are finely-tuned computers living inside a shell called the head.
The problem with living inside your head is that people can still read your face.
"Soooo... Why you so mad today?"
"Um, well, I'm not."
"You look mad."
"I'm not. I'm contemplating things."
"Strange. Your contemplative face looks like your murder face."
I suppose the introspective moments of my life must look like this on the outside:
(ಠ_ಠ)
Lo, the text anatomy of a psycho-killer. Or a quiet, solitary wallflower.
The extreme introspection that follows such withdrawn moments lend other people to misjudge the emotional cocktail brewing within their soft-spoken contemporaries. Compounding the problem is the fact that many introspective people are seemingly extroverted in nature when they go out into the world. They can be charming, charismatic, highly friendly, even loud, but the needs of their personality still dictates when they need to recover. For some, it's sitting with a tub of ice cream watching a movie. Reading a book. Listening to music alone. Playing a video game. Everyone needs a break from life at some point.
For myself, I believe it functions as a coping mechanism. Social interactions can hold some degree of anxiety or tension for people that naturally adhere to solitary habits. My day job requires a great deal of interactions with strangers. For the most part, it's easy to put on a smile and tread through the day, greeting faces that'll likely never remember me again. But once the day is over, all that interaction wears thin on the thread of my sanity (dramatic phrasing is a sledgehammer). I need something to calm myself down, so I come home, spend an hour or two listening to music, surfing the internet, reading, or writing something like this. It's cathartic, relaxing and gears me up for whatever comes later.
I'm not sure just how many suffer from such abrupt withdrawals. Mine can come off abrasively if I don't guard myself in contact with other people. So whenever I recognize the need to go through one, I do my best to pull myself inward without leaving the front door open for all to see. I haven't discussed this process or "coping mechanism" with anyone else that undergoes a similar process, so hopefully somebody that reads this will have some idea what I'm talking about. Or a friend or relative of someone can relate.
Or maybe I'm the only one that does this and I'm just crazy for a wallflower.
