Website Wednesday: Introvert, Dear

Please forgive me as I swerve from a helpful music therapy website post into a more personal website post. I am an introvert who was made to feel ashamed for my personality traits by teachers, youth group leaders, and professors. In a world that values extroversion, I am a quiet person who is not very prone to those qualities. It is difficult for me to attend gatherings of people, much less be gregarious and make people pay attention to me.

It has taken years for me to be comfortable with who I am and what I need as a human being from relationships with others. It has been good to see that others are out there, feeling the same things I feel, and are writing about their experiences. One website that I particularly enjoy is Introvert, Dear. 

The posts on this website are often relevant to me, but some are not. As an introvert (as far as you can get on each and every scale that I've taken) raised by an introvert and an extrovert, I felt understood most of the time by my parents. My mother stood up for me when the youth group leaders decided something was wrong with me because I was more interested in theology than in ski trips. I did get yelled at because I looked around lots in fourth grade, and my teacher did not like that behavior. We have since discovered that I can hear really well, have very little auditory figure-ground discrimination, and was distracted by the ambient sounds in the classroom made by my fellow students, the HVAC system, and all that stuff that happens. It didn't really affect my performance in that class, but I still remember Ms. Morency as someone who wasn't able to understand me at all.

If you are an introvert like me, then check out the website. It has lots of posts from lots of different introverts. If you are not an introvert, then reading some of these might be illuminating as to why some people respond the way they do to specific things or situations.

Thanks for reading!

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