I wasn’t bullied, but it just could be I was too involved with the-then current task at hand to notice what others were doing or saying. I didn’t care anything about socializing, but I also really didn’t know about it. I didn’t know there were activities that didn’t invlove solving problems or answering questions of some sort until I was in my late teens. Even then I just didn’t pay much attention to anything other than what I was focused on — like tunnel vision.

I’m 35 now and through different kinds of therapy have discovered a lot about the world I didn’t even know existed; you know, like that dumb question a lot of people tend to ask, “Have you been living under a rock?” when they discover you didn’t listen to a certain kind of music as a teenager. I could easily ask them the same question with more validity when they don’t know much about earth history, how to work a GIS program, or even tell the difference between limestone and granite. “What? You are the one who brought up rocks, Mr. Extro. Or did you think we all had a petrified fossil inside our head like you?”

Practice your craft folks, because doing what you love to do out weighs making lots of money doing things that make you miserable. I have 4 sesonal jobs within my craft of geology and paleontology. I love it because I can work on my own, but there is always someone I can consult if I need to, and they all ‘shop talk’ (more on work and less about societal things).

If anyone is looking for a good career for introverts, it is in the geology field or doing something within a museum (cleaning bones for assembly prep, picking bone/teeth fragments out of sediment, digging at an actual fossil site, digitizing records or mapping etc). Being a female isn’t always easy in a male dominated field like geology, but they appreciate us a bit more for showing up — similar to how math and physics clubs are always wanting to recruit more females.

I am a 19 y.o. introverted female (ISFJ to be exact) and I started to delve into understanding introversion a year ago and it was a HUGE breath of fresh air and unfortunately, the only places I continue to feel that sort-of-normal are on online communities directed towards introverts.The outside world hasn’t changed.

I completely agree with this post! I think males can get away with the introverted thing better. My younger sister, a year younger, is very close to me, but she is extroverted and it has started to wear at our relationship now that both of us drive and have some freedom, because she always wants to go out and…I always want to stay in reading, being on the internet, or watching a movie.

I’m not sure how to be concise with this, all I can say is that the difficulty of being an introverted female has made for an entire life of feeling disconnected and consequently seeking various forms of escape. I don’t feel like I belong, in this family, for other reasons (abusive environment in which I have never and still don’t feel safe) than extro/introversion, but even my younger sister doesn’t quite understand who/what I am.
Outside of my family, it’s been a joke.

Growing up, I carried a book with me EVERYWHERE (a means of escape, a means of not having to engage in excruciating mindless chatter), and of course, no one regards a person who brings a book into a restaurant with them very well. But I just couldn’t stand small talk; not knowing about introversion back then, I just deemed myself unfriendly and in need of being fixed. I badly wanted to fit in and many times put on several caricatured masks, but I don’t keep up pretenses very well and I would always “regress” to my deep, thoughtful, reserved self. I don’t mean to make this all about race, but race also played into the mix with me. I am African American. I didn’t feel like I quite fit in with white people because of certain cultural differences and standards (but I had a few white friends), and to make it worse young black kids rejected me because in THEIR quest to fit in, they displayed mostly negative black stereotypes–ones I didn’t display, so I never had any black friends. So I have always felt like an outcast, mostly attracting international friends here and there, but never really fitting in. Always on the outside looking in. I’ve been called snobby and intimidating and boring as well, and those used to severely offend me, but now I understand those (still unfair) labels a bit better.

I also detest materialism and caked-on makeup. It’s fake, point blank period! There’s no way around it. Why don’t other people want lasting-friendships, like I do? What’s the point of hanging out with people if you don’t even really want to get to know them? That’s what I feel like the majority of the “Loud” people do: they find people to ENTERTAIN them, and…that’s all. I mean, that’s as far as you can get with 90% mindless chatter in every friggin interaction.

And now, due to extreme isolation in college because of academic demands and simply no one really caring whether I’m around or not, I am suffering with depression. But that started a while ago…

Anyways, thanks for this! It’s very inspiring.