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

[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.