About three years ago, a friend made me watch Susan Cain’s Ted Talk “The Power of Introverts.” That was a first time that I heard someone specifically advocating for the need for the quiet (and the quiet people) that our culture drowns out. While Cain’s ideas resonated with me, I lacked the time to read her book Quiet until just this spring. Having studied temperaments and personality types a bit, I did not expect to learn anything earth-shattering, but I was pleasantly surprised to learn more about myself than I had expected. In a culture that blaringly promotes the need to “be yourself,” I frequently feel that “being yourself” is acceptable only when it means being the brash, bombastic, enthusiastic, bubbly, eccentric nonconformists sharing that message in the media. In the same movies and shows that claim to appreciate people being themselves, the quiet characters are marginalized, mocked, or perhaps pitied. We have allowed the fictional version of our culture reframe our view of reality. So many of us now live fictionalized versions of ourselves. Recently, some colleagues invited me over for dinner and games. I have been interacting with them in this setting enough to feel none of my usual qualms until I showed up. The colleague I feel most comfortable around (a bubbly, vivacious woman) hadn’t come. When I asked about her absence, I was told that she doesn’t like crowds. Though disappointed at her absence (especially since no one had warned me that our social group that night would triple in size), I was thrilled: I had found another closet introvert. And that’s what I am: a closet introvert. My acting experience allows me to blend in with the loud world we live in. Even at church, the one place I should be allowed to be the temperament God made me, I flit about as the social butterfly that I am not, cringing at the partly self-imposed pressure to be what I’m not. No, having a quiet temperament does not give me an excuse to be rude, nor does it mean that I don’t like people. (As anyone who has gotten me on the right topic can tell you: I love a good conversation. Many introverts do, as Susan Cain explains.) What overwhelms many introverts, according to Cain, is not people but stimuli of any kind. That idea has allowed me to reframe my ideas about myself and my interaction with people. I’ve been perplexed at what I perceived as inconsistencies in my behavior because I still viewed introversion and extroversion as a spectrum of whether people drained me or energized me. When I get into a good conversation (particularly a sobremesa), I can be engaged for hours and walk away reluctantly. On the other hand, I feel exhausted after an hour of a meet-and-greet at work. The answer, Cain suggests, is how much and how much new stimuli is in each situation. Knowing that has allowed me to make better choices in which social invitations I accept and which I decline. And, having read Quiet, I’ve given myself permission to stop being a social butterfly unless the situation truly demands it. At church yesterday, I engaged in conversation with only two people during the greeting time in the service (I’m convinced an extreme extrovert invented that concept), and instead of the usual feeling of being incredibly alone after that, I felt refreshed, connected, and part of the group.
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While listening to Malcom Gladwell’s book Outliers, I heard the title statement: A nation is born Stoic and dies Epicurean. (Frustratedly, I can’t properly site my source since I was listening instead of reading: I have no idea what page or even what chapter in Outliers that gem was on.) Although I’m not certain that we could describe our nation’s birth as truly Stoic, I see students of Epicurus all around me.
This past year of teaching, I’ve noticed that increasingly classroom management methods I was taught and have successfully used for years no longer work with the rising generation. The most frequent unsolicited feedback I get from students is “You should give us Skittles instead of M&Ms.” (I cannot imagine having the gall to say to my wonderful third grade teacher, the only teacher I recall giving us tangible rewards, “Thank you, Miss Thompson, for the cool pencil, but you should stock more cool erasers in the classroom prize box.”) As much as I enjoy teaching my students, sometimes I am amazed at how little they appreciate gifts because they have so much given to them. How did our nation grow into a place in which a student who doesn’t earn the candy treat responds, not with harder work next time, but with, “Fine, I’ll just buy some candy at lunch”? And it’s not just in my students or in the larger American culture that I see this trend. I wonder if this trend is true of maturing into adulthood as well. When we first start out “on our own,” we appreciate the free but ugly furniture that has been abandoned by its owners because the furniture serves its function whether or not the pattern is aesthetically pleasing. We consider a meal from a fast food dollar menu as a treat. And any computer access is better than none. That was me at least. But now, I consider a treat to be dinner at The Pit in Raleigh, or dessert at the Marietta Diner in Marietta, or anything from Caffe Piccolo in Pawley’s Island. I desperately want to recover the ugly free furniture that I am sitting on right now. And I’m thinking about pricing a new laptop because mine has trouble with the Internet. It’s not enjoying luxury that I’m questioning. I wonder whether we realize how frequently we have redefined luxuries without even realizing we have. Foolishly, we compare ourselves among ourselves rather than comparing ourselves against a standard. (Too many of my students think that they are District 12 from the Hunger Games. I popped many self-pitying bubbles when I drew the many glaringly obvious connections between modern America and the Hunger Games’s Capitol.) Epicurus promises pleasure, but where does that pleasure end? Well, I have successfully ignored that part of my reason for starting a blog was to placate my conscience's annoying reminders that I tell my creative writing students that they need to share their work but have no intention of sharing my own writing. Unfortunately, my conscience has started yammering again, and this post is a result of that yammering.
About two years ago, I reworked the following story for a writing competition that I encouraged my students to enter. I, naturally, backed out. In my defense, the competition rules allowed entries no larger than 600 words; I had already cut this story down by half, and cutting it any further seemed a more painful surgery than I had the courage for at the time. "Shut Doors" A sudden crash of ice cubes falling in the freezer jolted me awake and sent me frantically, but unsuccessfully, trying not to fall off the couch. Breathe, I coached myself from inside the tangle of blankets on the floor, the spine of the book that had broken my fall digging into my back. The crash, the fall, and the nightmare were conspiring to keep my heart racing and my pulse rushing in my ears. Struggling against the blankets’ tentacles, I retrieved my book and shuffled to the kitchen for coffee to chase away the nightmare. My hands were still shaking from—what had I been dreaming about? In spite of scattering coffee grounds on the counter and floor and pouring water both into the coffee maker and on the counter, I was able to get coffee brewing. Reaching for a broom to clean up my clumsiness, I glanced at the backdoor. Was it sleepiness or the late afternoon shadows making the backdoor seem more ominous than usual? How I hated that door. The pattern of the wood’s grain looked like a wolf loaming over me—watching from a large solitary eye wreathed in concentric circles surrounding the knot in the wood. No wonder I had nightmares. As a child, I had avoided being in the kitchen alone; as an adult, I pretended the backdoor didn’t exist even as I passed by it to toss the fallen coffee grounds in the trashcan. In our childhood, Liz, knowing the door haunted me, in true sisterly fashion would send me on errands to the kitchen. “Please, Heidi,” she would say, “I’m really thirsty, but my nails are drying.” Her faithful vassal, I would brave the kitchen’s terrors to fetch her water. Thinking about Liz and the wolf was worse than whatever nightmare I had just had. Watching the door out of the corner of my eye, I poured coffee and opened the book, glad that Liz couldn’t see me still cowering. Of course, if she were here, she and her friends would be behind the closed door of our bedroom. After crowding me out of my own room, she would hand me a book off the shelf and shut the door. I’d go to the couch and read, pretending that I didn’t care—didn’t want to be with her and real people. The memories were all the same—me standing alone in the hall, scrunching my toes into the carpet—it had to accept me, well, my toes, at least; me sitting on the couch in a blanket cocoon, losing myself in a world of fiction; me leaning against our closed door, hearing the sounds of friendship drift through the door—loud enough to hear, but never clear enough to understand. I didn’t want to be alone. Yet I was, both now and in my memories. Only once did I open the door after Liz closed it. I remember the whirl of movement, the sudden light, the full volume of the girls bore down on me and left me panicked in the open doorway. In unanimous silence, girls in fuzzy, neon pajamas and green facial masks stared up at me from the braided rug. Before Liz could say anything, I had mumbled something about getting a different book. With a flounce of her newly styled hair, Liz handed me the first book she reached. Book in hand, I pulled the door closed and stood in the dim hall, my hand on the doorknob even after hearing the latch click. I stared at the door, despising it for shutting me out—despising me for shutting myself out. I shook my head, clearing my mind of the memory and studied the backdoor. Perhaps my dislike had little to do with the door’s wolf-shaped grain and more to do with the other shut doors in my life—doors I shut myself, doors others shut on me. Suddenly, seeing the wolf, a witness to my loneliness, was insufferable. Leaving coffee and book on the counter, I retrieved old newspaper, a paintbrush, and a can of paint. No more would I fear that shut door. |
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