People are cool

(if you aren’t afraid of them)

March 25, 2024

First post with these fun comment things, wheee!

One of the first ways I introduced myself here was how I used to score 97% introvert on the 16 Personalities test. While I still consistently test as INTJ-T (Architect), I score around a D- on the introvert scale now. You might think, “Oh, scoring an A+ on the introvert scale? Well, surely there’s nothing wrong with being an introvert!” Scoring an A+ on the introvert scale is literally a diagnosis for a hermit.

Allow me to enlighten you with what life was like as an A+ introvert through snippets of my journal:

1. “When we were introducing ourselves, my heart was beating so fast when the person before me was going, and now my lips are uncontrollably shaking unless if I force a smile.” -7/28/22
2. “It’s too bad that I didn’t talk to him very much or catch up with him and I probably will never see him again so here I am with a nice existential crisis [about how I could’ve simply said hi], but oh well.” -1/10/23
3. “At the end, [the instructor] made the two quietest people on each team to make our points, and I was one of them because. Oops. I don’t really talk.” -8/28/23

Anytime there was some sort of event that involved people I wasn’t familiar with, I didn’t want to go. In eighth grade and most of freshman year, I didn’t really talk to anyone new. I always talked to the same people–not that talking to old friends is bad or anything, but the underlying problem was staying in my comfort zone, during which I wasn’t happy anyway.

Looking back, introvertism was the cause of many of my problems. One of the problems was making friends/socializing with unfamiliar people, which requires practice. But introvertism inherently results in intentionally avoiding people to not talk to them because of the fear that this new environment would turn around and judge us. Laugh at us. But this was all in my head because no one actually does that. And not talking to people would only enhance this fear, because I never built up the skills to talk to people, which led to nitpicky comparisons and lost opportunities.

It’s not just about lost opportunities. Talking to people builds up the ability to… judge? Interrogate? Conjecture? All those words are too strong, but the idea here is that talking to people allows us to better gauge who someone is. And, well. Speaking from personal experience, that is pretty important.

One of the lessons that I wish I thought about more earlier is people are not out to get you. This may be feeding into a naive view of always looking at the glass half-full, but this could also be from self-love and the belief that you are already worthy of surrounding yourself with good people. I believe that most people genuinely wish the best for others, and are willing to help. I found that I became happier the more I talked to people. I also don’t judge myself as I did before, and carry myself with just a little more authenticity and confidence. There’s no way of winning in overthinking. With overthinking, there’s this “heads I win, tails you lose” mentality. I still remember talking to people online at first, who are good friends now. The caret blinks, expecting my words to flow, but it waits and stares back at me. With every keystroke, I worry that the sentences won’t come out right, or that they weren’t clever enough. But why mask who I was to start if people were going to find out who I was anyway? The only way is to just write.

That is not to say that I have no fear in talking to new people or that I’m a newfound extrovert. But there’s a little comfort in knowing that merely existing is okay and good enough, and that people are cool if you aren’t afraid of them. If there was one thing that I could tell myself, it would be that she’s already good enough and doesn’t need to prove herself to anyone. The fear of not being good enough wasn’t an effective method to push her into being better, and instead, it restricted her in what she could’ve been. Alternatively, I wouldn’t have told her anything. Talking to people was something she had to find out for herself.

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