I just finished a Summer internship as a hospital chaplain on Friday. The program is called CPE, which stands for Clinical Pastoral Education. Although much of the time is spent visiting patients, there is also a lot of time for reflection and processing of the experience. Although I think this has been an incredibly enriching experience for me, as and introvert I found it totally exhausting. Since it’s finished I feel like I have almost boundless energy, which I think is a sign of just how drained I felt this Summer.
This has led me to think a little about what it means to be an introvert and I’ve decided to start collecting tips and perspectives on how to keep the world from sucking the life out of me. I’ll probably make a few posts on this topic as I figure more things out, but I want to start with this simple idea; The world as it is can work very well for an introvert.
I saw a book recently called “The Introvert Advantage: How to Thrive in an Extrovert World” and it really bugged me. I don’t like the suggestion that somehow there is something weird about introverts, or that somehow the world wasn’t really made for us. I was mulling this over today as I did some shopping at the grocery store, so I’d like to use that example to help prove my point.
I know some introverts probably don’t like going to the grocery store, especially if there are a bunch of annoying extroverts around who want to chit-chat about nothing. I have found this to very rarely be the case, in fact, I think most of the time I don’t say a single word to anyone when I’m at the store, except of course the cashier. I think part of that avoidance comes from the fact that there are so many people around when you go to the store, so it requires a little change of internal thinking to realize that you can feel totally blissfully alone when shopping for groceries. Although there are people around, they hardly ever talk to each other, and if someone does want to talk to you, it’s pretty inappropriate for them to follow you around the rest of the store.
So today as I was thinking about ways that I can find alone time I realized something that never struck me before. The grocery store is a wonderful place for an introvert. I walked through the store thinking about what I wanted to cook for the next few meals, examining the produce, looking at the sales in the meat department, mulling over my decision about what bottle of wine I wanted to buy. I think I spoke a total of ten words the entire time. When I was buying butter, there were two teenagers trying to decide if they needed salted or unsalted butter, I explained that the unsalted would be used for cooking and that salted is probably what they were looking for if they wanted “regular butter”. Energy expenditure: pretty close to zero. They wanted information, I had information, they didn’t feel the need to tell me about the weather, or about how they have a really hard time deciding what brand of butter to buy because there are so many brands, or how their baking cookies for their friend’s birthday and he’s turning 16 so it’s a really big deal and they just wanted to do something nice for him, or any of that kind of pointless noise that extroverts often fill the air with. I also think I said “ok” when the cashier told me the total and I clicked the little button on the debit card reader, she may have also said hello and I responded appropriately. This whole thing brings me back to my point about the myth of the “extroverted world”, the basic functioning level of a grocery store is one of people quietly shopping by themselves, or with someone they came with. Extroverts actually have to go against the nature of the grocery store, and bug people, chit-chat, ask questions, etc.. I’ll bet that most extroverts don’t realize that about the nature of the grocery store, to them it’s just a big place full of people to talk to, and they assume that everyone goes around chatting with people or at very least that the people are just bored and waiting for someone to start talking at them.
Ok, ok. That’s a little snarky, I know that most extroverts (like my mother for instance) are trying to be nice and they really would not want to talk to people if they knew it bothered them. I’m the same way from the opposite end, if someone talks to me, I’m usually very friendly and polite, I’m willing to expend the energy if it brightens someone’s day.
So my advice to extroverts is this. Next time you go somewhere public, especially somewhere that you go frequently, try being quiet to get a sense of what that place is like without you talking. I think you’ll be surprised, this is really an introverted world. My advice for introverts, when you need some time alone, don’t think you need to hide, unless you’re incredibly unlucky and people constantly bug you its easy to find peace and solace in a public place. The world is set up so that we can spend most of our time in silence, have some pity on those poor extroverts that have to go against the way the world works.
