My 87%

I – Diagnosis Part 1

            When I was a sophomore in college I was diagnosed, if only perhaps a self-diagnosis. I lived in a dorm on my college’s campus and spent most of my days surrounded by my peers. That’s how college worked, you had a roommate who was around too often, friends you lived just a door or two away from, and people dropping in during almost all hours of the day. I welcomed a knock at the door with eager anticipation of the revealed mystery knocker, I sought out friends when my homework was done or even when it wasn’t, I put myself in places where people would be hoping for an encounter with someone I knew or someone I didn’t. Interacting with my friends was my lifeblood, and that was clear to nearly everyone but me. It wasn’t until November of that year that I realized how much this constant exposure to people really came to define me, it wasn’t until then that I found myself frequently removed from people. For one reason or another I had to go home nearly every weekend. Thanksgiving, a wedding, whatever it was, I loaded up my 2000 Volvo S40 every Friday and slid into the drivers seat for the three-hour drive to Middlebury, Connecticut as the mileage clicked up over 150,000 with each passing minute. I’d spend only the weekend at home, sleeping in my own room and seeing no one but my parents and grandparents for the duration of my trip. But as Sunday afternoon approached I found myself growing giddy. I’d trek three hours back to school and before even unloading my bags, I found myself in my friends apartment.

            I knocked on the door and after hearing an unfaced voice say, “Come in,” I burst through the door.

            “Hey!” I shouted, after all, I do have a naturally loud and booming voice.

            “What a surprise,” Miguel said to me when I walked in. His tone was dry but bleeding with sarcasm. Despite his best efforts, I could notice just the faintest trace of acceptance in his voice.

            I spent almost all of my free time in my friend’s apartment that year, and of the 6 guys who lived there, Miguel gave me the hardest time about my constant presence. He was joking, for the most part, though they don’t say, “there’s always a little truth behind every ‘just kidding’” for nothing. This one particular Sunday, though, I remember I was extra hyper. I’d always been regarded as a little sister to these guys, the butt of the joke, the one left out of the explanation, and I couldn’t blame them. I liked it there, I liked my role, and I played the part well. Anyway, this one night I think I was standing on a chair, I tend to stand on things when I’m excited and if I wasn’t that night I might has well have been.

            “You always get extra hyper when you come back from being home. It’s like being away from people for a few days you have to catch up on all the people time you’ve missed.”

            And there it was, I was an extrovert.

II – Diagnosis Part 2

            In the winter of my sophomore year of college I applied to be an orientation leader for the coming year. After weeks of waiting, I opened my mailbox to find a crisp white envelope sitting inside reading, “Congratulations!” As part of the training for O-Staff, we were sent an email with a link to the Myers-Briggs personality test. We had to complete the test prior to our first training session, which would take place in April. Seventy-two questions long I submitted the completed form and was brought to a page with my results. It broke you down into four categories, the first of which being, percentage introvert versus percentage extrovert. “87% extrovert.” I didn’t know what to make of it. I had no context for this number to rest in, no way to make sense of it. All I knew was now I wasn’t just Amanda anymore: I was Amanda the 87% extrovert, which I guess explained why I’d get so excited to be around my friends again after being home for the weekend. It came to explain why I was so excited to hear a knock on the door, or why I’d put spending time with people ahead of things like schoolwork.

III – Misconceptions Part 1

            A lot of times people think life for the extrovert is easy. They can talk to almost anyone, they’re outgoing and easy to relate to, and they don’t need to be alone all the time. Well this isn’t actually true. Life for an extrovert can be challenging. Right around the same time I was discovering the true intensity of my need to be surrounded by people, my three closest friends who lived in my dorm sat me down and said, “Amanda, you’re too much for us, we can’t carry you, you’ve become a burden, we can’t be friends with you anymore.” That’s not word for word, but at one point or another, across a very long and tear-filled conversation, all of this was said. Boom. I was confronted with it, the very first time I’d ever been confronted with it. 87% of me was messed up. 87% of me was driving my closest friends away and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. I came to hate myself for being an extrovert.

IV – Misconceptions Part 2

            Aside from trying to maintain my extroversion so it didn’t affect my relationships, I found myself wrestling with an internal struggle. Because I was an extrovert, it was assumed that social situations would be easy for me. But they weren’t always. I was awkward and uncomfortable and scared a lot of the time, especially in the classroom. If I got a dollar for every time a professor said at the beginning of a new semester, “for all of you introverts in the room who don’t like to talk in class, I’d urge you to try and do so,” I’m sure I could pay my tuition twice over. I hated hearing this. It was really hard for me to feel comfortable talking in class, but I wasn’t an introvert and I didn’t want to be. In my final semester of college I was sitting in my senior seminar class, the class that’s supposed to be a capstone to everything you’ve been learning or whatever. We were discussing the book Mind of the Maker by Dorothy Sayers. We spent over an hour discussing this book I barely understood and I’d said nothing to contribute to the conversation. Sometimes I’d think of something to say, but I couldn’t say it. Fear drained my throat dry, my palms turned clammy, and I felt the pit in my stomach widen. Without exaggeration, my eyes brimmed with tears. I was 21 years old and couldn’t participate in class discussion. But how can that be if I’m supposedly an extrovert? Wasn’t this supposed to be easy for me? It wasn’t, it never was, and despite what my teachers and professors would say, it never got easier to talk in class.

V – Don’t Call Me An Introvert

            When my friends walked out on me that day in April of 2012, I hated everything it meant to be an extrovert. The extrovert in me hated it and I wanted to singe it out of me. But between my sophomore and senior years I found that there wasn’t all that much I could do about my extroversion. Sure, when I retook the Myers-Briggs a year later, my extroversion percentage dropped a bit. But that can only be chalked up to maturing. There are some stories of major conversions, introverts becoming wildly and untamably extroverted, and extroverts retreating into introversion, but I wasn’t going to be one of those cases, and here’s why:

            In my senior year of college, after two years of obsessing over what it meant to be an extrovert, I found myself defending my own. I was living in an apartment with five of my friends. Of the six of us, there were five introverts and one extrovert, and that one was me. For the first time in my life I found myself as the only one of my kind, and I wound up resenting my friends for it. I hated the environment I was in because I thought they were going to try and change me, or that I’d inevitably be changed because of them. But despite my fears, they didn’t make me an introvert. It’s not contagious like that, you see, and being with people so different than me I came to be more proud of who I was. I know they rubbed off on me in their own ways, and if I were to take that Myers-Briggs test again I’m sure my extrovert percentage would have dropped again, and that’s okay, I’m sure I rubbed off on them, too. I don’t mind being a little less of an extrovert, being alone is good, and being okay being alone is even better. That’s something I don’t think I grasped my sophomore year. Too much of anything, even a good thing, doesn’t make it better. But I’m an extrovert. I’ve been a clueless extrovert and I’ve been a discontent extrovert but now, finally, I’ve grown to love who I am, even that 87%.

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