Theater was my gig. Public speaking was a piece of cake. Ordering food was my responsibility in the friend group.
A keyword to note: “was”. Someone must have pulled my ‘extraversion’ plug because my introverted side consumed me whole out of nowhere.
The culprit is the pandemic, and also the not-so-glamorous college experience of a freshman. When the world went into lockdown, so did my social skills. The lack of social interaction absolutely tore down my ability to interact with people. I crawled deeper into my own cave when I came to college. Abruptly swarmed by such a big pool of people, – many of them with ‘big’ personalities that I often did not have the guts to converse with – I was intimidated. Now, staying in and enjoying my alone time brings me so much joy.
But beyond all of this, what’s perplexing is the effect of that abrupt transition from extraversion to introversion.
As an extrovert, I measured my success and happiness by the number of people I befriended, the times I hung out with friends and the attention that I received in real life and on social media. When introversion hit me, the standards I held myself up to did not change from when I was an extrovert. In other words, I was still expecting myself to form the same number of connections in the same depth and with the same benefits I wished to achieve as before. Of course, I was constantly let down by my performance.
New environments, experiences and energies call for adjustments in the mindset. As an overachiever and a perfectionist, turning that notch down is so incredibly difficult because it almost feels humiliating to do so. But, overcoming that humiliation to finally see and wholeheartedly accept the benefits that come with my new personality will be a crucial milestone for me. Rather than reconnecting with my past self to search for what makes me happy in the present moment, resetting my boundaries and standards will be what helps me safe-keep my identity as I move forward.