The trauma of being an introverted child

Stop me if you remember hearing any of these low-key insults when you were a child.

“Boy, you’re shy, eh?”

“What are you, anti-social?”

“Why don’t you go make some friends?”

“Why don’t you go out more?”

“Not very talkative, are you?”

Some interactions weren’t even low-key insulting. They were just … insulting.

“You’re boring.”

Imagine going through life having the way your brain operates, the way your personality manifests itself, the very core of who you are, insulted on an all-too-frequent basis.

Let me tell you, it sucks.

As a 41-year-old who likes to keep to himself and avoid socializing for the most part, I still occasionally hear comments like the ones above.

The good news is that, at this age, I simply don’t care what anyone thinks of me anymore.

But when you’re a kid, a teenager, or a young adult, it’s downright traumatic.

What questions like the ones above do to introverted kids is slowly chip away at their love for and confidence in who they are.

‘Why don’t you have more friends?’

I remember one time, around junior high, I was sitting on the porch of my family’s home on our leafy street.

A girl I’d been friendly with since elementary school spotted me and came over to chat.

Now, we were not the kind of people you would expect to be friends.

I was fairly reserved, exceptional at school, and scared to get in trouble.

But I could be pretty funny too.

I don’t want to carry a room, but I’m happy to throw in surprise comments here and there that catch people off-guard and can induce sudden, genuine belly laughter.

I can be a fast talker when I do choose to talk (this is probably the result of my ADHD brain, which is always running at a mile a minute).

My friend was in the “cool” group.

She was pals with a lot of the neighborhood a**holes, she smoked and possibly drank already. Keep in mind we’re around 13 at the time.

Anyway, she sits down and we’re talking for a bit, and all of a sudden she goes, “why don’t you have more friends?”

I didn’t resent the comment at the time, but it obviously did stay with me.

She was one of the few people who really understood who I was as a person and she was genuinely befuddled.

“I don’t know,” I said.

I kind of knew though?

I’m a bit of a weirdo, I overthink things. I was not what would be traditionally considered “cool”.

But also, at my core, I didn’t want more friends.

As a deeply introverted person, having a lot of friends is work.

Relationships are work for introverts

I choose not to have more friends, and that choice is reflected in how little effort I put into building and maintaining relationships as an adult.

Maintaining relationships takes effort for introverts. Lots of it.

I have two best friends, one from childhood back home, one from university (we were best man for each other’s weddings).

Those two friend relationships are literally all I can or want to maintain.

I absolutely love to hang out with these two friends when we’re passing through each other’s cities.

But do I call them all the time to chat and catch up?

Absolutely not. They know who I am, and they like me anyway.

‘You’re really boring when you’re not drinking’

Once, in university, I was riding the bus downtown with a group of people from my residence building.

I’m quietly watching the buildings zip by my window and all of a sudden this guy goes, “James, you’re really boring when you’re not drinking.”

No wonder I developed a problem with alcohol, right?

This is what I mean about people chipping away at your self-respect by suggesting your level of socializing is inadequate.

I drank all the time in university, which is not abnormal for people of that age.

I won’t lie, I did it because I found it fun, but I also did it because I had been taught not to like who I was without alcohol.

Alcohol often made me the funniest, most uninhibited, most talkative person in the room.

Alcohol made me who I thought other people wanted me to be. Sober James wasn’t good enough in my eyes.

When I reached my 20s and was back home from university for a family event, one of my dad’s friends thought it appropriate to remark that it was great to see me come out of my shell or something like that.

He also pointed out to my mom that he was “really worried about me” when I was a kid.

Meanwhile, start to finish, this guy’s life has been a f***ing mess!

Thank you sir for your concern, however.

This is the problem … if you keep your mouth shut, if you like being alone, you’re assumed to be boring or have something wrong with you.

You can be 10x more successful than the people judging you, but it doesn’t matter when you’re quiet.

The reality of the introverted personality

Extroverts think we have nothing interesting to say, but one of the reasons is all the rapid-fire thoughts rattling around in our heads sometimes.

It’s almost hard to settle on one long enough to spit it out (even if we wanted to, which we typically don’t).

In fact, for me anyway, a lot of those thoughts revolve around the dumb stuff that attention-seeking extroverts are blathering on about at high volume.

OK, OK, that was a joke (sort of), but the point is this: it isn’t that we don’t have anything to say, it’s that we don’t want to say anything.

I hate talking for the most part, and I don’t like when attention is focused on me.

I find phone conversations excruciating, and everyone knows it.

If I haven’t seen you in a long time and I come for a visit, I’m happy to catch up. I actually love visiting with people I care about in person.

I can be quite talkative in those situations.

But this s**t just kills me:

*phone rings*

“Hey! How’s it going?”

“Oh good, good.”

“What’s new?”

It’s at this point I want to say:

“What’s new? Nothing is new, as usual! Why are we even doing this?”

What I actually say is:

“Hoo boy, um … not much really, ah …”

*struggles to get through conversation*

I always appreciated my late Grannie’s approach to phone conversations.

I would call her on her birthday or whatever and we’d chat for literally like five minutes and then, out of nowhere, she’d be like “ok well I’ll let you go.”

It was super jarring, actually!

I asked my dad about it and he just said, “oh she does that with everyone, she feels like she’s keeping them from something more important.”

Despite the altruistic explanation, I think Grannie probably liked being on the phone about as much as I did.

Stop trying to save us

Now, at 41, I don’t let others’ opinions of me affect my opinion of myself.

I have a job, I have a family, and I have a core of friends I actually love being around (just don’t call me lol).

Who am I trying to impress?

But I do have some advice for all your extroverts out there.

Young introverts don’t need your help.

They don’t need to be saved.

So the next time a quiet child in your life seems to keep to himself a lot or choose his words especially carefully, resist the urge to ask an insulting question like, “why are you being so shy?”

Learn from them, and just shut up.

Friends, thank you so much for taking the time to read this post all the way to the end! If you enjoyed it, please take a moment to give it some claps so others can find it. I love to hear from you in the comments, too!