The Pain of Being Introverted

It's Halloween. I'm supposed to be at a party that theoretically allows me to meet other scholarship students. I walk in, and almost immediately tense up. I completely shut down. Instead of trying to talk to anyone, I choose to text my friend to hurry up and arrive before I die of discomfort.

Ah, the joys of being an introvert.

It's not like I can't talk to people I don't know. And I pride myself on being (somewhat) easy to talk to. It's just that it's so damn hard. My heart goes in my throat, and it requires a sincere effort to get the words out of my mouth. And usually, I can put on a pretty brave front and act like I talk to strangers all the time (after all, I did do this when I worked in retail...but that was mostly because I would get fired if I didn't). But it requires way too much effort.

And the worst part of talking to people you don't know is that 99% of the time, you have nothing to talk about. So naturally, you pretend you have something to talk about. You ask them where they're from. Their major. Their hobbies. The freaking weather. Uggh. It's so hard and boring.

And that's not where the implications of being introverted stop. Something I suffered from throughout high school was the fact that my brother and I were literally in every class together. He is the polar opposite of me--crazy extroverted, natural leader, everyone loves talking to him, etc. So naturally, there was a constant comparison. Sometimes he would even blatantly point out how quiet I was in class, which is probably the last thing you want to do to anyone. And if I ever tried to talk to anyone, he would point that out too. "Oh, look who's finally talking to someone. Maybe you won't go through life alone." And then I would stop talking. So it's not just being introverted that hurts; it's the fact that more extroverted people notice and usually feel every obligation to blatantly point it out.

In many people's eyes, being introverted generally has a negative connotation--one that usually points to a social outcast. I wouldn't go that far. If you put me in the right situation, I'll talk. If you give me the right person, I can talk forever. But the problem is that the conditions have to be just so for me to feel completely comfortable. If not, usually I'll force myself to appear more extroverted, and it is a painful, painful process to pretend to be someone you're not. Yet, I wouldn't have met my friends this semester if I hadn't pretended like I wasn't introverted. Ah, the necessity of being as extroverted as possible in this society.

I'm getting better. I have done so many things within the past few months that I knew would be good for me but made me extremely uncomfortable. Heck, I even joined a somewhat clique-y club. Alone. And I am fitting in, slowly, but I'm getting there.

Sometimes it can be agonizing being introverted, but most of the time I'm okay with it. There are some advantages, but sometimes it is incredibly difficult feeling pressure to be someone I'm not naturally in this extroverted society. Or maybe, this society is actually introverted and we're all having to fake it to have a decent quality of life.

Secular or Expanded Horizons?

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. - Aristotle

Up until college, my education was largely Christian-based. At times, it was more Christian than others (sometimes very uncomfortably Christian). As a Christian, most of the time I was fine with it, and in reality, it's not too different from a more "secular" form of education like one would receive in a public school. But in high school, I started to like it less and less because of what it led to represent--which was something very un-Christian: bigotry.

Take, for instance, biology. If you're taught biology from a Christian perspective, you basically have the idea of intelligent design drilled into you. There's nothing wrong with learning about intelligent design. In fact, everyone should. Yet there is something wrong with not learning the other side of the argument, aka what many uneducated call "evolution" which they actually mean to be microevolution (for this reason, I wasn't taught anything about the theory of evolution until I took AP biology, and only then, it was done grudgingly out of necessity).

The term "evolution" has a very dirty meaning in the Christian education system. Ignorantly, many people assume that evolution as a whole means that God didn't design the world, and that everything came about through one thing being derived from another. However, an educated Christian would realize this is ridiculous. A large portion of evolution cannot be argued, or very well at least; for example, if you have a population of a species that you separate by some biological barrier, such as a geographical barrier or reproductive barrier (this is known as allopatric and sympatric speciation, respectively), the species is going to evolve. In each case, the species is going to have adapt in some way to the change. You cannot deny that, regardless of your faith, or lack thereof. 

In actuality, the part of evolution that denies intelligent design and what many Christians are probably upset about is microevolution. Microevolution basically concerns the very beginning of evolution. It attempts to answer the question of how everything came to exist. A devout Creationist would say that God created everything, and that's the end of that. But for evolutionists, the question is not so easily answered. In an attempt to prove that life could be fashioned from simple gases present in the early earth's atmosphere, there was a famous experiment done called the Miller-Urey experiment in which scientists recreated early earth's conditions in a closed system. They ran the system for a while, even recreating lightning that was present on early earth by sending electricity through it. After the experiment ran, there were a few substances present, notably, one or two amino acids, that led the scientists to conclude that life could be made just out of the air, literally.

My point in detailing this experiment is that many Christians would have a very negative reaction to this. But it fascinates me. Perhaps I don't really accept it, but I still find it intriguing. In fact, it's the clearest thing I remember from advanced biology.

Now in college, I see the "secular" side of it that I was warned of sooooo much from my past teachers. "College will try to convert you. You need to be strong in your faith. Take everything non-Christian with a grain of salt, because it's not right." I heard that about a billion times before I actually got here. On reflection, it was one of the most bigoted things I've ever heard. 

In my introduction to philosophy class, we're covering philosophy of religion right now. There are so many arguments against God that I have never been aware of, and it is incredibly engaging. For the first time in my life, I am seeing the other side of the argument. And while I may not accept it, I am extremely interested. It is expanding my horizons, opening my eyes to ideas and letting me consider them for myself without the noise of others' opinions. It makes me realize how lacking my education prior to college was, because it just exemplifies how incredibly biased it was--something, I'm sure, is not Christian in any way.

I am not bashing Christianity. I am bashing bigotry, and trying to show that it actually limits your education. If you choose to only see one side of the problem, you're ignorant. The better thing to do is to fairly consider both sides of the problem and draw your own conclusions, rather than forcing your opinions on others. 

Perhaps I am just extremely tolerant and open to different ideas. But shouldn't we all be? After all, education really is just the act of expanding your horizons. Why not take full advantage of that?