River: Verts

[mdlbear]

(/me waves at pocketnaomi and cflute -- hope this explains a few things.)

I was talking with my coworker rowanf this morning; she said that the difference between an extrovert and an introvert was whether other people feed you or drain you. I had to disagree.

I know at least one person who is fed by her close friends, and drained by everyone else. I added that, in my case, I tend to be fed by people when I'm feeling good, and drained when I'm hurting. But I realized later that I was wrong.

When I'm hurting, I don't mind being around people I don't know very well: they make me feel a little less alone, and I don't really have to interact with them. I might even get little positive strokes if I make the comparatively minor effort of saying hello.

But people I know require energy that I don't have. Interaction takes energy. The better I know them, the tighter the interaction, the more energy it takes. Being around someone who loves me and wants to pay attention to me can be actively painful. I don't know why that makes things worse, but it does. That's why I can sometimes do OK all day at work, being friendly and interactive, but have to crawl into my cave and hide at home.

Even when I'm doing well, I suppose, people drain me; I just have a more favorable energy balance on the whole, and interacting with people I know is easier. Who knows, these days I might even be a little bit of an extrovert, able to gain energy at the same time as I'm giving it. Not when I'm sick, or hurting, or depressed, though. Then, I'll be in my cave, or all alone in the midst of a crowd of strangers. It's about the same.

Comments

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

Am I the one you meant who's energized by her close friends and drained by everyone else? Just curious.

[mdlbear]

Yes. I suspect Callie's more like me.

[mdlbear]

Probably the hardest thing to learn, when you're dealing with the other kind of personality, is that you don't treat them the way you want to be treated. I've had several people comment to that effect.

If you're lucky, they figure out how you want to be treated, but they can't always manage it. I still don't get it right a lot of the time.

[selkit.livejournal.com]

Tell me something... am I simply looking at myself, thirty five years from now, when I read into things I see posted here? Things I see paralleled from time to time in your writing, still manage to pull the occasional gotcha on my psyche. There are times when close friends bother me intensely and even a simple hello feels like I'm attempting to lift a mountain, yet I'll happily trundle online, talk to complete strangers, be absolutely civil to that nice tech-support rep I've never heard the name of until the beginning of his script-recital...

Eerie parallel. Got the source code for your insight? I could definitely use it, or at least the documentation for it.

[chaoswolf]

Very eerie, I know. Shortly after he posted it, I said to him "Sounds very...selkit. He laughed and smiled.

[mdlbear]

I'm trying to write the documentation now. Geek user's guide, or something like that. Mostly I look at the problems some of my friends are having, and if I think I have a better understanding of it, I post something.

Geeks like me are actually pretty common on my friends list, and the people who love us seem to need a lot of help understanding us.

Click on the "river" tag for the rest of it.

[jenk]

One useful difference I've found between introvert and extrovert is how much thinking you do inside your head vs talking it out. If you get further with difficult problems by talking them over with someone or writing them out, you are more likely an extrovert. If you can't think as well while talking something over and figure things out mostly in your head, you're more of an introvert.

[mdlbear]

Talking about a problem with a coworker sometimes helps a lot, but I can't talk or listen and think at the same time. I have to rehearse what I'm going to say before I say it, and I have to take notes or I won't remember what was said to me for more than a minute or two.

[screaming-angel.livejournal.com]

It would seem, Steve, that you and I have a great deal more in common than I ever imagined.

You're just better and expressing it than I've ever been. Practice, I guess.

- Jared

[mdlbear]

Lots more practice -- I'm easily old enough to be your father.

Plus being forced to do a lot of introspection recently.

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

I'm with rowan on the energy in/out thing but it's very situational; it depends on the people, my energy level to start with, my mood and my reason for being there. talk to a stranger for work? easy - and we'll probably hit it off. talk to a stranger at a friend's party? unlikely unless a friend introduces them and starts the connection. I'm a shy extrovert/introvert switch and I loathe being told either that shy is binary (yes/now) or that you grow out of it...

[mdlbear]

*nod* Actually I can't talk to anybody at a party, unless we can go off someplace where it's quiet. Even for a geekish discussion that doesn't take much energy, I simply can't function in a room with other verbal things going on.

[kyrielle]

Interesting. For me, it's not closeness of the person but intensity of the exchange - which falls disproportionately on people close to me, because the less-close a person is, the less-likely I am to get involved in an intense exchange that I care about with them. But if I do, the drain factor is similar.

I definitely am drained by interactions, classic introvert (despite being very VERY talkative which causes many people to assume I am an extrovert). But the exchange to get my burger or buy my shirt or straighten out the stupid email chain that has gone awry at work is usually on a level that requires no "social thinking" - just "social auto-pilot" skills. It drains me relatively little because it's patterned and I can just walk the pattern.

Just walking the pattern with your nearest and dearest...well, in some exchanges it's fine (especially if they know I'm worn!)...but generally it's a bit risky to handle it that way.

And interestingly, groups of people, if I have to interact with them at all, are very draining. But GenCon, which is FULL of MOBS of people, is not draining as long as I'm not in a game or otherwise interacting with a group. (Emotionally/mentally, that is. Physically, that's a lot of walking.) I can go through a mob of several thousand people in the dealer's hall and almost no energy is required (because my social involvement is limited to not slamming into people, or not saying what I think when people cut me off or whatever), but sit me down at a gaming table with five strangers and a game to play and I start to wear down. (Sit my husband down at a table and let me simply observe, and I'm back to fine. I'm interacting only as much as I choose, and mostly not at all or just with him - and in that context, I know he doesn't mind if I'm mostly quiet, because he's busy!) It's why I hate trying to get into a game on generic tickets - it requires lots of tiring interaction before you even get to the main thing - plus there's risk involved (will I get in? have I just wasted my chance at the entire slot by picking this game to try for, if it's too full?), which increases the emotional involvement/intensity, and thus the energy outlay.

...not sure how I ended up on a gaming convention, there, except it made a nice example. Our gaming group has a similar affect on me although, with the exception of my husband, they are mostly acquaintances that I could (in any other context) respond to casually with low energy output.

This is not to say that some social interactions don't also energize me, but it has to be because they're very positive, or very right or very helpful, usually very easy to sustain my end of, and almost inevitably involve only one other person.

*wanders off, still thinking and muttering under her breath, trying to work bits of this out*

[mdlbear]

Sounds like we're very similar, except that I'm more likely to be energized by "geeking" - sit me down for lunch at a table with five laptop-wielding strangers at a software convention and I'll have a great time and come away feeling high for the rest of the afternoon. Sit me down for lunch with a good friend,...

Oddly, me helping the other person uses less energy than the other person trying to help me. It must be that giving advice puts me in extrovert mode for a while; when I have to think about myself I turn back into an introvert. Come to think of it, that probably applies to geeking as well -- I usually have plenty of new information and good advice to give.

Thanks!

[brmj.livejournal.com]

I also experience those phenomena to some extent.

[rowanf.livejournal.com]

Been reading the river posts with some interest. The "loner" thing is interesting. I am not sure where I fall along the continuum myself. Or is it a matrix.

Me - Happy to be with friends, total cuddler with intimates. Hates sleeping alone. Wants alot of alone time (esp. computer/reading time) whilst awake. Likes to be sick in solitude, wants to take care others who feel poorly. Doesn't like crowds. Isn't particularly self-analytical. Tis a puzzlement really. Thanks for pointing me to this stuff.

[mdlbear]

You're welcome. I'm a slightly different mix, but still a mix. It's far from a continuum when looked at closely; there must be four or five dimensions in there.

[brmj.livejournal.com]

This stuff doesn't apply to me 100%, but it gets close. I might be a bit less of an introvert than you, but much of this is comparable. I should also note that I am not particularly experienced at the whole insightful introspection thing, so if any of this appears obvious, stupid, poorly articulated or logically flawed, it probably is.

Most often, I find face to face social interaction draining. However, if I am in a situation in which a small number of other people who are sufficiently comfortable with silence are present, I can enjoy myself quite a bit, as long as there is a sense of mutual acknowledgment and an absence of idle chatter. I'm not saying that there can't be conversation, just that it must have a good signal to noise ratio, be quiet enough and be strictly voluntary. I find that in those rare situations I get many of the benefits of being alone, in addition to some of what other people talk about getting from social situations. There are a few people who I particularly enjoy "hanging out" with because this sort of situation happens almost automatically.

I also find that I can often enjoy conversation, arguments and debates on a topic I am sufficiently interested in and knowledgeable about, as long as the signal to noise ratio is high enough. Afterwards, I am more or less social'ed-out for a while, but I really enjoy it at the time and tend to look back at such discussions more fondly than not.