extrovert bias | sensitive type

Jenna, my comrade in bloggery over at The Wishing Well, just published a post about Susan Cain’s book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. To my great surprise, her reaction to it was very different from mine. Since I had recommended it to her enthusiastically, I started out writing a reply in a comment, but it became way too long, so I’m publishing it here.

Wow, did we read the same book? Before I read Quiet, it had literally never crossed my mind that I was an introvert, much less an HSP (which Elaine Aron believes Susan Cain also is). I thought I was an extrovert inhibited by a tendency to isolate. I defended this, extolling the joys of solitude, as I still do. However, before I read Quiet, those joys were seriously undermined by my secret fear that solitude was an unhealthy indulgence, an escape from my shameful inability to interact “normally.” Whether it was my failure to produce extroverted bubble and bounce on command, or my persistent inclination towards behavior I had been taught was dysfunctional, I was coming up short no matter what I did. Continue reading →

Headshot of poet Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy" Movers and shakers. Who appears on your mindscreen when you hear that phrase? Corporate CEOs? Elected officials? Activist film stars? In other words, extroverts. Or at the very least, skilled extrovert emulators.

But if we look at the first verse of Ode, in which 19th century poet Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy coined that phrase, he seems to be describing an entirely different sort of person:

We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;—
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

Wandering alone in nature? World losing and forsaking? In other words, introverts. And what’s more, loners!

If you read the entire poem, Continue reading →