First, I want to thank everyone for a wonderful response to my first question. I was so happy to hear the experiences and thoughts of my friends and colleagues; it dovetailed nicely with some of the writing that I’ve already been doing. It was exciting and entertaining, inspiring and- most of all- normalizing 🙂
Time now for part two!
The second, and quite common, method of living with introversion is masking. From fighting a natural desire to take downtime or to thinking before speaking, to the ever spoken about “faking extroversion” (there’s already a section/rant in the book on this), sometimes there is a seeming need to hide naturally introverted tendencies. To that end, I want to pose a question to the introverts and the extroverts in my midst.
TO THE INTROVERTS: Have you ever felt like you had to hide your introversion in your daily work? If so, (a) how?, and (b) why?
TO THE EXTROVERTS: Based on what you know of introversion and extroversion, what elements of introversion do you think someone would be most likely to hide?
And for those introverts who aren’t yet done with the first question, or didn’t get a chance to contribute to the “demystify” section, I have a bonus question for you. There are a few anecdotes in my early drafts about situations that, upon reflection, are definitive “introvert” moments. I want to expand my sharing of those experiences to others. So I pose to you: Looking back, can you think of an incident that defines you as an introvert?
I’ll leave this question open for a few weeks, and look very forward to hearing more from you all. Thank you so much for being part of a dream project; I can’t wait to see what the collaborative final project looks like!
Amma Marfo 