9 - Introvert for Life

Something I exhibited in abundance since my toddler years, something that everyone who knew me iterated at every opportunity, was a shyness, which enveloped behaviour and manners always and everywhere. It was plainly apparent from the bowing of the head when I was asked my name as a toddler; in the turning away of the head, at first, then the hesitation and awkwardness, and that only after a nudge from Mother, in greeting people or simply saying goodbye; in the reticence to raise my hand in class to respond to teachers' questions, even when I was amongst the very few who knew the answer; in the turning of eyes away from the attention of the teacher or the inviting glance of a pretty girl; in my glossophobia resulting in feelings of insecurity and nervousness, and occasionally panic, at time I had to confront a group of people and express myself, stemming from the innate fear of saying something wrong and making a mistake; the difficulty of opening up to people I had not met before or familiarized myself with, and the inability in building bridges of communication and new friendships; in the awkwardness and even muted paralysis in my rare direct encounters with girls during adolescence; the shrinking and recoiling silent in a room corner at social events, even amongst peers and acquaintances; in the general lack of composure and inundation by fright when I was inadvertently becoming centre of unwanted attention amongst people, having their eyes fixed in expectation of a response and, as I believer, to gauge and judge me. All these were the general feelings I was occupied with, along their reflexes and subconscious effects, in many situations with people I was confronted with in adolescence, and further down in life.

The brooding and worrying, nerves and fears in the face of situations like the above caused discomfort, even harshness and personal embarrassment. Many a time those feelings could be elevated to a torment of the soul. To be fought against and defeated with will power and reason alone was not an easy feat. Pants of anxiety shot through my inner self when exposed bare in front of an audience, especially if not afforded the time and opportunity for reflection beforehand or, at least, a tentative collection of thoughts and summoning the necessary courage and composure for a rational approach to the situation. When I was afforded the time, preparing my talk word by word, where and how I would stand, how I would deal with the one or the other possible eventuality, was arduous and mentally torturous, so much so that at the end body language became robotic, my speech stilted, and, worse, myself conscious of being perceived as unnatural and nervous. It could become problematic, if it were an interview in front of a panel for a job application or a presentation in front of a group of people. Although gradually blunted with age by virtue of experience gained and the repetitiveness of such situations, yet, I was compelled to live a big part of life with such feelings and worries girding me. In short, my psychology and demeanour were enveloped by shyness and reserve and diffidence, effecting nervousness and anxiety when faced with and simply being and talking with and to a group of people. Rarely and with significant mental effort and resolve were I able to manage to suppress those impediments, along with the anxiety they caused.

For its part, introversion is not a transient feeling or emotion arising as a reaction to situations and events like the aforementioned. It is, for better or worse, a concrete personality trait that is an integral and relatively inflexible part of one’s character. During my school years I was not aware of that trait, which would burden me in one way or another for the rest of my life, let alone, of my position at the extreme end of the wide range spectrum of introverts. I did only have a vague conception, perhaps not even that. I was first ‘diagnosed’, so to speak, as an introvert by Kostas S, a doctorate candidate and then future eminent professor in psychology, our neighbour and for a blue moon a friend in the American city where we were both studying. It happened at one of the gatherings for meatballs and wine, he and his wife Tasoula used to organize in their apartment, whilst listening to plaintive songs by our national bard Kazantzides and the like. In distant foreign lands, strong centripetal forces of affinity are exerted attracting members of the same national heritage to each other, regardless of personality, and interests and aims in life. We had not met in person before that first gathering, he and Tasoula organized ad hoc to get to know us, however it did not take long for Kostas to reach a diagnosis, as he was watching me perched in the corner of the sofa in his living room, silent or at best taciturn, with measured words, timid in manners, with a glass of wine permanently in his hand or mouth trying to overcome with alcohol my shyness and social inhibitions. Kostas was categorical in his assessment: ‘You clearly have an introverted personality, L!’ The brand of introvert I was rather brutally assigned did not bother me (as it had the gravity of an expert in the field of behavioural sciences) manner, at least as the unforgettable ‘cold person’ by which my friend Billy characterized me with his ironic style in our early teenage years, or the labels of ‘shy’ that I often heard whispered in adult conversations about me. On the contrary, it exposed a more accurate depiction of myself, and it was a beginning of a long road that eventually led to acceptance of the proverbial ‘I am who I am’, and adapt to the demands of life with this given personality trait, with this ‘weakness’ -being unable to do much to radically reform in that respect. Unfortunately, a person’s character, at the core of his personality and outward behaviour, hardly changes from the moment someone one settles in adulthood, its malleability is in a way inversely proportional to the self-awareness he attains.

It was several years after George S’s initial diagnosis whilst in America, before I got my hands on Susan Cain's book: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. I read it, as a mature thirty-year-old, on a bus in the town Reading, commuting to work. Reading the book was like seeing myself into a mirror. The self who avoided and found it awkward to have a small talk with strangers or people he was unfamiliar with; the self who at every social event at home organized by my partner despite my resistance and on occasions against my will, became a high mountain to climb and came up with every excuse to avoid. The one who in evenings before a presentation in front of people could lose his sleep, while in the hours and minutes leading to the event his nervousness could become unbearable with no remedy at hand to address it. The one whose difficulty in communicating with people in informal social events was mitigated and overcome, only with enough, beforehand and during, alcohol consumption, sometimes with regrettable consequences. The one who, when his eye caught an acquaintance on the bus, the train or the sidewalk, tried to hide from sight, turned his head, changed direction or sidewalk, so that any kind of spontaneous small talk is averted. (Spontaneity hardly coexists with introversion; introverts, I learned, avoid impromptu small talk as the devil avoids incense.) The one who was overwhelmed by a slight panic when the phone rang unexpectedly ("Who might it be now at the other end of the lines? What does one want to ask or say? What should I say in response?") The one who, every time was forced to interact with people and cope with social situations, in the end became mentally and physically exhausted. I found that this relatively excessive hypersensitivity to external stimuli, at the core of the extreme introvert personality, was scientifically explicable by the structure of the brain and size of part of it. I resigned myself to the fact that I could not much about it!

I soon discovered peace and tranquillity in the company of myself, in the endless conversations with him people and impressions, in thoughts and reflections; in solitary wanders in cities and, later in life, in the countryside, in lonely drinks in English pubs, or secluded in my room next to a lamp with a book to read or the laptop to browse. Unsurprisingly, misty melancholy weather brought light and joy in my soul, even more so when walking in the drizzle or listening to the rain. At the end of my reading of Susan Cain's book, I felt a kind of relief, almost the joy from revealing and naming a big part of myself, about whom I was and I am, and, significantly, that there was not much that could be done to change radically. In the eyes of most colleagues and acquaintances, I was who is labelled rather sympathetically in England ‘socially awkward’ or rather contemptuously in Greece as ‘a recluse who breaths on his own’ –a lone wolf.  For me, I was simply a withdrawn person preferred and for that matter enjoyed his solitude. I have now been familiarized with and consolidated this notion about myself: I heard it so many times by so many. Characterisations and labels which I once found derogatory and sometimes insulting are no longer bothersome, but rather I occasionally refer to them as self-introductions, in preludes to attempts at communicating and interacting with people.

Therefore, I was an introvert and in fact ‘burdened’ by a rather extreme form of introversion. The symptoms of the behavioural conditions that took Kostas a few minutes after our introduction to diagnose in the dinner party evening were there from very early age, and prominently demonstrated throughout childhood and adolescence: like Akis' party that I strived to avoid trying to catch a cold from by sweating and then exposing myself to the cold of the winter in our balcony; or like refraining myself, either by choice or by design from being part of groups of friends and schoolmates in social activities; a lone-wolf playing basketball in the deserted by the summer afternoon hear basketball courts in our holiday resort and elsewhere or cycling in its streets; a solitary walker of the streets of Thessaloniki or unaccompanied spectator in its cinemas. Alone amongst the four walls of my small room, reading, playing chess against myself, fantasizing and masturbating, whilst others were having fun in cafes, discotheques or in house-parties with friends.

All in all, the life of an introvert entails a lot of misery during adolescence; it is aggravated by unwarranted anxieties in adulthood and maturity, as one has to immerse oneself in different social and work environments, and struggles to survive and be recognized as an individual within. The struggles can become strenuous and the mental exertions exhausting when this innate introversion is compounded by shyness, timidity and even cowardice. Without those inhibiting traits or, at least, not conspicuously manifested, life could follow different paths – professionally, socially and emotionally. Because it is social relationships and human interaction that largely determine existence and a way of life, given established notions and public opinion that characterize a life and career as successful in our milieu and the Western world we are destined to live in. I imagine that just a handful of introverts ever found themselves at the top of corporate pyramids or became leaders in one of our ‘liberal’ political systems, in positions where the prevailing wisdom in the West associates with ‘success’ –beyond material wealth and prosperity. In short, introversion affects precisely those social relationships that, to a not insignificant degree, direct, place and classify individuals in the established social order and ladders.

At the end, there were positive and comforting: the amount of knowledge I accumulated by immersing myself in books from individual solitary study; the plethora of ideas and thoughts that were generated in the countless hours of conversing with myself, and even in the depth of that thinking and the quality of some of these ideas; in the incessant and exhaustive processing and fermentation of knowledge, sensations, memories and experiences in the mind; the discipline and method and patience in action at study and work, when left alone; in the analyticity and gravity, the precision and density of those thoughts and ideas, in the few times I was required to express them orally and more often (and welcoming) in writing; in contemptuous and swift dismissal of superficial reasoning some and vacuous, pointless chatter. (Naturally, I found chatter and verbosity tedious and dull, although I rarely plucked the courage to cut off chatty people. I listen to them, whilst I my mind was taking a journey into a different direction or down into myself.) Still the main advantage introversion allowed me the high levels of self-awareness and self-consciousness I conquered.

There was something else I found comforting... From the minimal extent to which science was able thus far to map and describe the functions of the human brain, it seems that introversion as a character trait springs from mainly genetic origins. Books and publications on the subject talk about differences in the structure of the brain between introverts and extroverts; they describe different reactions of the brain to biochemical substances secreted within or the electrochemical reactions from sensory experience of the world and the interaction with the social environment - differences in the proportions and relative measures of these substances in each individual. Establishing a scientific explanation of human behaviour with respect to the environment, from the point of view of human biology is complex to a non-expert like me, and knowledge not worth or too late pursuing. A superficial diagnosis is enough, even superfluous. After all, for the individual, the consequences and effects of one’s behaviour are what count, in so far as this social behaviour affects life’s course. Given this elementary knowledge of biology, I stopped placing the blame to my parents, the immediate family and the school environment for the problems and obstacles my introversion threw into my path. At the end, a different upbringing, a different mental development with an alternative education and set of skills, only slightly would have affected my social behaviour and interactions.

In my teenage years, I was not aware of my introversion. I knew broadly that I was shy. Parents and relatives, directly or behind my back, flippantly or seriously, brandished me as ‘unsociable’ and ‘shy’, pointing out that ‘I found awkward to communicate with people’. Beyond a certain age, such comments and judgments stopped bothering me and I disregarded them silently or with a smile of resignation, whilst keeping mental notes. It did not cease, especially in those teenage years and years of early youth, to cause torments in social situations. My shyness and reserve, compounded by my inherent introversion, posing formidable and in many cases insurmountable obstacle in efforts to satisfy desires and fulfil ambitions. Now, in the autumn of my life, in a stage where whatever major had to be done in life, more or less has been concluded, whatever noteworthy to be achieved has been achieved, I reconcile with myself and his personality flaws and shortcomings, some of them prominent. But there is being at least a closure. I am getting to know myself better.