An Introvert's Voice
I was first given the Myers-Briggs personality test many years ago when I was working at a university clerical job. My introvert score was almost all the way on the end of the continuum. Sharing results with my co-workers, the most common response was, "You're an introvert? Really?" As if the fact that I liked to talk meant that I must be extroverted. My response was generally, "Yes, that's totally correct. I talk because I'm uncomfortable, not because I'm not."
I know that on Facebook countless introvert memes and articles scroll past me on a daily basis. Articles with titles like, "The 50 Things Only an Introvert Understands" or "Why I'm an Introvert, Even Though I Spend Every Waking Day with People." They delineate specifically what I've always understood -- an introvert regains energy by being alone, an extrovert gains energy from interactions with people. Interacting with people exhausts me in general.
As a person with significant social anxiety, I don't tend to be quiet when I'm nervous. I tend to talk. Talk is a shield that insulates me from others. I'm often not interacting, but preventing interaction. I sound tremendously social. I state my opinions on all sorts of things. I discuss my interests (or expound on them), give advice, am verbally supportive and occasionally critical of others.
What others may not realize is that all that talk doesn't let people in. I offer my ears to scratch, but don't roll over and let people pet my tummy. If they try, they're likely to get bitten. The things that are most core to my personality, that define me, aren't things you're going to get to know in the course of a conversation. Often it takes me years to open up to someone.
It doesn't mean I don't want to communicate, to experience that deep connection that comes when people care about each other and exchange thoughts, feelings, trust. I have that with a very few people. But all those words I use with people don't make that connection. I do it in a different way. My true voice, the place where I become vulnerable, is my written word.
It's been a rough journey to learn to be vulnerable when writing. I remember the first time I ever included a nude person in one of my stories, one I wrote for a college class. Her nudity was not in any way supposed to be titillating, but was symbolic of her own vulnerability in the situtation. I was terrified to let anyone read it. There were a lot of other raw feelings in that piece; it was perhaps the first time I had ever let a story expose me, to show others those raw places that could be hurt so badly.
My writing over the course of a lot of years has been a process of learning how to make myself that vulnerable. It has been the opening up of my voice, that voice that is so absent when I try to communicate in person. And it does not sap my energy, but feeds it, because when I'm writing, I'm alone. Communication without the drain. One way, of course, and not a substitute for the sort of deep, heartfelt two-way communication I have with my closest friends. But it's communication, nonetheless. It's my true voice.
Read my works, and you'll learn more about me than you might in years of talking with me.