Hello, I’m an introvert.

When going through Psychology 1101 to cover a required sci­ence elec­tive, I stud­ied the char­ac­ter­is­tics of intro­ver­sion and extro­ver­sion, but the mate­r­ial never really res­onated with me. As I saw it, there are vary­ing degrees of both, I fit some­where on the intro­verted side of the scale, and this was the extent of the appli­ca­tion of such a subject.

I can force myself to be social, friendly, cheer­ful (what Shirley and I call being on), but I can only do this for lim­ited amounts of time. Usually I can keep it going just a few hours for a party or gath­er­ing, or as long as a few days as required if we’re out camp­ing or snow­board­ing, but never longer than this.

The rest of the time I spend in my room, away from the world, because the social inter­ac­tions of every­day life are a huge drain on me. When I’m alone, I recharge in a way I can’t explain. I’ve spent years feel­ing guilty for this behav­iour. The North American atti­tude is that there’s some­thing wrong with being quiet or unso­cial. The most strik­ing mem­ory I have of this was dur­ing frosh week, when oth­ers would con­stantly harass me to go drink­ing, or danc­ing, or par­ty­ing with a bunch of peo­ple I had never met before.

Now there’s an expla­na­tion that makes more sense to me than a sim­ple degree on a scale. In a recent arti­cle, neu­ro­science researcher Marti Olsen Laney talks about the con­nec­tions between intro­ver­sion and biol­ogy. “It impacts all areas of their lives: how they process infor­ma­tion, how they restore their energy, what they enjoy and how they communicate.”

I real­ize that there’s a greatly sig­nif­i­cant cor­re­la­tion between the way I behave and my intro­verted mind­set. Introversion is an atti­tude that affects almost every aspect of my life, deeply rooted to a phys­i­o­log­i­cal level. It isn’t some­thing I should be ashamed of or embar­rassed about.

And if I can come out of my shell every now and then, I’ll be alright.