In the last day or two, I have reflected with amusement on the condition that is being an introvert. I’m normally fine with it; I like being in my little cocoon most times. Most people leave me alone, I leave most people alone, and all is well. Granted, reaching out isn’t the easiest thing to do when one finds small talk a nuisance large enough to discourage conversing with people more extroverted, or when say, you simply want to say hello but have nothing concrete to discuss.

Now, apply that to trying to talk to another introvert. You’ve got two people who are both in their bubbles, not wanting to bother other people, and while they might wish to touch base with a friend? They know in their soul just how annoying and invasive the small talk is, the fumbling towards concrete conversation. You sit there, staring at the friend being online, willing them to message you; you’re obviously online, so they should *know* that means you want to talk to them. You sit there, fumbling for some pretext or another that isn’t too flimsy to start off a conversation with; do they remember x, did they do y, crap crap crap crap crap. You can spend days, staring, thinking, willing – the wall is there, and getting past it seems very daunting.

The nice thing one realizes in many cases is that once you’re past it, it’s spun sugar glass. Your fellow introvert has been sitting there willing you to message just as hard, and is as relieved as you to jump on the flimsy pretext to get a conversation rolling and get to the more important work of re-affirming the boundaries of love and friendship. For a relationship with an introvert IS work, but I consider it worthwhile – you get what you put into it paid back in spades. I find my conversations with other introverts to be ridiculously edifying, because there is a point. There might be oodles of silly, and a fair share of gossip too, but none of the extrovert ‘sin’… other introverts know what I mean, though I’ll attempt to explain for the sake of the extroverts.

If you make the effort, they make the effort. But because (as many extroverts don’t savvy) introverts just seem to be sitting there and uninterested in ‘engaging the right way’ (whatever that means!), they might get overlooked. And while no, they don’t want to exchange pleasantries about how are you and how your day is and all the trivial crap that they could go to your social networks for (repeating oneself is torture for most introverts; ‘how are you‘ is probably one of the most disgusting phrases in the English language), that doesn’t mean they don’t want to share and tell… just not until any business is out of the way. And text is truly the medium of the introvert; it enables us to engage with more people with less damage to ourselves. While there are those who work on the assumption that everyone online is a social pariah with no real life or friends, I think that most of us introverts understand that this is, truly, an extro versus intro issue to the core. Our voices can be heard here. We can disengage more easily without being written off as rude or stupid. We can maintain more friendships than ever before with less cost to ourselves – it might not be barfing in bars or breaking legs dancing, but it provides just as much joy.

It still doesn’t magically break the spun sugar glass though… fie. Back to thinking up a pre-text to message a friend with! *grins* And yes, there are probably a dozen more points that could be made, but that’s difficult to do when one’s brain is out to sabotage them in full while noise levels drive one’s anxiety beyond points of reason. 😉