Tunes in my head: Swept Away by Phish
Atmosphere: Rested
It's interesting to see what people's perceptions of you are.
Someone described me as a highly extroverted person yesterday. (No, I'm not saying who.)
See, they listed some things about me that seemingly make me an extrovert - eccentricity, love of the stage, weird sense of humour...
But then again, I look at myself and see more things that would label me as an introvert. I generally try to shy away from large social gatherings, I hate going on the stage (although admittedly I love coming off it, great feeling.) I often find myself without much to say in conversation recently, although when I do get on a sort of roll it becomes easier.
I even hide behind things, physical things. The glasses, the long hair, the beard. People see it as a chance to be different. I don't, I just want to hide. Prevent people from seeing me.
They say an introvert has a few close friends, and an extrovert has many.
This is possibly the biggest difference. I don't see myself as one with a massive friend circle. I only see myself as a person with a few close friends...
Massive social gatherings scare me to an extent. And I hide behind it by being the eccentric bastard I am. People assume that's just me being massively outgoing.
But such is life...we fear.
A few people have seen the softer side to me. The person who gets easily hurt, the person who softly talks about things at the early hours. The person who just sits and listens, who doesn't say much because they don't know the words to say.
Should I actively try to bring this side out more?
Time after time, Annalise...
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1 comment:
I was surprised (though I suppose I shouldn't have been) when I found out some of what people thought of me. I didn't expect it from some of them.
"Eccentricity, love of the stage, weird sense of humour" - I would say none of these things were necessarily the marks of an extrovert. Even if they were, you can't just throw everyone into the category of extrovert or introvert, plenty of people are somewhere in the middle.
An interesting thing I just discovered (thanks Wikipedia!), introversion is to refrain from social things by choice, while shyness is to do the same but from fear. I wonder what it is about someone that makes the difference between confidence in social activities (and/or extroverted traits) and fear/dislike (more introverted traits).
Regards the side of your personality you want to present, well, it depends on what your goal is. You might feel that you should be presenting the most accurate version of yourself, but if your goal is social success, this is almost certainly a very bad move. And this assumes that the different 'sides' of your personality/behaviour/etc can be influenced (i.e. induce them to be presented as the public you) to a useful extent by your own actions, which I have not found to be the case in most situations.
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