#serious-thoughts #personal-development Sometimes I'm not particularly sure if I'm an introvert or an extrovert. I enjoy being around people. I enjoy talking to people and being authentically myself. I enjoy telling people stories about my own experiences. I hate being alone and I hate having nobody to talk to. So clearly I'm an extrovert, right? But I hate being in large groups. I hate putting the mental energy in to figure out how to inject myself in a conversation. I hate not knowing how to contribute to a topic. I hate feeling like the center of attention when there's expectations placed onto me by a group. I enjoy being unbothered and having my own agency without the influence of others. When I type myself via MBTI or OCEAN, the tests usually peg me as 50-70% extroverted, depending on my mood that day. But how come sometimes I feel like I'm the biggest introvert in the world? I had felt mini-existentialism too, because how do I keep testing this way even though sometimes I feel like absolute shit in the presence of other people? Clearly the answer is that extroversion and introversion is a spectrum, but I think also that it's based off of whether a person generally internalizes and externalizes their energy, rather than how social they are. There are introverts who like people and hate themselves for not being able to interface with others. There are extroverts who despise social interaction but are particularly good at it for some reason. I think of myself as *the* most introverted extrovert, or also just an extrovert with crippling social anxiety. I'm [[i went to a large-group gathering and i DIDN'T want to wallow in a corner|working on it, though]]. I went to a 3-day long onsite for work recently, and at the end of every day found myself absolutely drained. Especially when conversations drift to work topics, I notice myself totally zoning out and dying internally. But when conversation topics are fun and about the personal lives of others I feel the energy coming right back, and I'm able to engage again. Unless my social battery is completely depleted, in which case I'm completely dead again. I wish that I had the resilience to Just Keep Yapping™️. But I'm not particularly young anymore, and with age comes more refined interests, and it's difficult now to keep up with conversations and introduce new topics especially when I'm not particularly interested in it. Things I'm exploring for this: - [[thoughts on improv|Improv]], which was excellent for overcoming social anxiety in general and not feeling too afraid, but I still have to explore more in whether or not it was effective in getting myself to think faster and more spontaneously. - Forcing myself to go to group things where I'm uncomfortable, but these things come with an intention of being vulnerable about my own personal self, which I feel like comes easy to me now. My personal struggle now generally just becomes -- * How do I maintain interest in a topic or conversation that I might have absolutely no stake in? * If I don't know anything about a topic, how do I muster curiosity to maintain adequate engagement? * God, I am so bad at coming up with questions. Or just having conversations in general. It's kind of another thing to work on, but at least I'm thinking about it. Maybe the reality is I'm just lazy and I don't want to expend too much mental energy to engage, even.