How to Be an Introvert

I've been an extrovert for a long time. A really long time.

In a world where whispers are yells and opinions are loudly-held, it's hard to think without feeling intruded upon by other people's talk, and impossible to speak quietly and still be heard—so I've adjusted by speaking every single thought that I have and doing it all quite loudly. Naturally, so has everyone else, which leaves us all with a cacophony of mindless words being repeated over and over and over till our eardrums are desensitized and our neurons no longer know of any other path to take.

End result? We've all turned into tedious people who can't communicate if our lives literally depended on it. And all our conversations go something like this:

"Hey, how are ya?"

"Doing fine, you?"

"I'm good. Kind of hungry though. I might grab some food."

"Cool, I think I'm gonna go to the restroom."

"Alright, see ya!"

All the time. This is every single conversation I've had today, and I'm not guiltless, because half of that dialogue belongs to me. We feel the need to fill every silence with words, and as a result, the value of conversation has gone down.

So, why do we keep having these non-conversations? It's a matter of habit and societal norms that propel us to live out loud. Many of us have become so ingrained into the culture of social media, which allows us to tweet, post, insta, snap, etc. all our thoughts and put them out for everyone to see, creating a habit of public journaling. This in turn, has seeped into our real-life conversations because it's all we know how to do anymore.

And it was exactly how I lived for most of my teenage life. Every single thought I had was propelled into the public sphere and returned to me with the number of likes and faves and comments deserving of my thought, which was a quantity of my worth to the world. I can't remember what finally instigated me to quit that lifestyle, but I did, and I'm never going back.

How I live now is prehistoric. I still have a phone, still text, and I have Facebook (okay, maybe not prehistoric, exactly), but that's it. I've decided that there's no point in telling all my thoughts to a world that doesn't listen and I will keep them instead to myself. I actively engage in listening more and speaking less, I've picked up my hobby of listening to podcasts again, I've done things I haven't done since I was in elementary school (like painting and frolicking in a field of grass), and I've felt in general more fulfilled and less anxious to please a tough crowd.

I won't lie and say that my conversations have become more interesting, but I have quit many conversations in the middle simply because they mean nothing to me. It's not entirely socially acceptable to walk away in the middle of a conversation, but I'm sure it doesn't matter to the speaker whether they're being listened to by myself or by air because either way, the same amount of though is being put into the conversation in reciprocation.

My call to action is to pick up the habit of introversion, and maybe that way you won't know what Sue had for lunch today (a sore disappointment), but you might just end up being a happier type of person.