Introvert Secret Lives

I closed my eyes and imagined a horse who played with her friends in a sunny meadow. Like many introverted children, my inner world was vivid and alive. The made-up story seemed almost as real as the actual world around me of toys and parents and pets. The horse and her friends were having a race to see who was the fastest. They dashed through fields of flowers and jumped over a glistening creek, when, all of the sudden, one of them started to flap her tiny, hidden wings and fly …

Suddenly, my dad interrupted my thoughts. “You have to say your story out loud,” he said, nodding to the microphone. “So I can record it.”

I looked at the microphone, then back at my dad, but I didn’t know how to respond. The things inside me had to be spoken? How could mere words describe the striking images I saw in my mind—and how they made me feel?

Sensing my hesitancy, my dad prompted again. “Just say what you’re thinking,” he said, as if that were the easiest thing in the world.

But I couldn’t. I continued to stare at my dad in silence. The secret world inside me would not come out. My dad grew impatient, probably thinking his only daughter was being stubborn, uncreative. The truth was I had no idea how to translate my inner experience into words. Somehow, I thought that with my father’s supreme intelligence, he would just know what I meant to say. But he couldn’t read my thoughts. And the microphone attached to the primitive eighties tape recorder couldn’t hear them. Eventually, he gave up and put everything away.

This would not be the last time in my life that my silence confused and frustrated someone. I would carry that feeling of disconnect between my inner world and the outer one with me for much of my life.

If you’re an introvert like me, you may have secrets inside you, too. You have thoughts that you don’t have the words to express and big ideas that no one else sees. Maybe your secret is you feel lonely even when you’re surrounded by other people. Perhaps you’re doing certain things and acting a certain way only because you think you’re supposed to. Maybe your heart longs for just one person to see the real you—and to know what’s really going on inside your head.

This is a book about secrets. It’s about seeing what’s really going on with introverts. It’s about finally feeling understood.

Turns out I’m not just an introvert but also a highly sensitive person (but I’ll leave that topic for another time). After reading dozens of books about introversion, I turned to the Internet. I joined Facebook groups for introverts and poured over blogs. My friends got sick of me constantly talking about introversion: “Did you know it’s an introvert thing to need time to think before responding?” I’d say, or, “I can’t go out tonight, it’s introvert time.”

I couldn’t shut up about being an introvert. It was like I had been reading the wrong script my entire life, trying to play the role of the person I thought I should be—not the person I truly was.

Don’t get me wrong. Learning about my introversion didn’t fix all my problems. It would take several years of hard, inner work—along with consciously deciding to make real changes in my life—before things got better. But for me, embracing my introversion—and stopping myself from trying to pretend to be an extrovert—was the first step. As I learned more about introversion, I became more confident in who I was. I started accepting my need for alone time. I saw my quiet, reflective nature as a strength, not a liability. I also started working on my social skills, seeing them as simply that—skills I could improve and use to my advantage. But most important, for the first time in my life, I started to actually like myself.

I was no longer an other. I was something else: an introvert.