“Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.” -Anais Nin

If you’re an introvert like me, you’ve come to the right place. We have it rough sometimes, don’t we? Having to be an introvert in such an extroverted society… it can be so easy to fall into a pattern of feeling alone, feeling sorry for ourselves, wishing we were different. However, over time I’ve realized how powerful being an introvert can be. I’m here to tell you that introversion is an amazing thing. It is an inherent part of your personality and if you can’t change it, you may as well accept it.

I spent most of my undergraduate college life forcing myself to be an extrovert solely because it seemed everyone else around me was. I was a square peg trying to force myself into a round hole and yet I wondered why I was always so exhausted. I was trying to be someone I wasn’t. During lockdown in 2020 I was forced to take a step back and have a few minor existential crises, at which point I finally started to tap into my introversion for the first time since high school. Once I accepted that part of my personality, I started focusing on the positive aspects instead of the negative.

One thing that helped me accept my introversion was learning to define it in a different way. I had to treat my introversion as a superpower, not as a mechanism for my own-self destruction. One of my defining qualities as an introvert is that I tend to be more quiet in conversations. One could view this as a simple unwillingness to participate in the conversation, but it is really me exercising my ability to listen, to actually hear what people are saying and how they’re saying it in an attempt to understand the true meaning of the words being spoken. Stephen Hawking once said,

“quiet people have the loudest minds”

and he was right. This is just one example of me tirelessly rewiring my mind to view my introverted tendencies in a more positive light.

Another aspect of my introverted personality is I always attempt to seek out deep, meaningful conversations. Part of the reason why I’m writing this blog is because I crave deep discussions, and I hope that reading this short piece elicits a conversation within yourself about your own introversion. I encourage you to see yourself in positive way because being introverted is a blessing, not a curse. Now go use your superpower! (Also it’s National Introvert Week so we should all be celebrating and/or plotting world domination right now.)