My introversion has been fully challenged the past week or so. I can hardly believe we are already a week into June and I’ve had no time for introspection or a moment to pause and replenish. Well, to be fair, I’ve escaped our house full of guests periodically with morning pool dips or afternoon naps. However, an introvert does not so easily recover with brief moments of solitude. So, today, I’ve taken the majority of the morning and early afternoon to escape to my happy place under the auspice of having a meeting with a friend to discuss a new venture in Orvieto town center – more on that in a later post.
It was actually great to catch up with my friend, but now that our meeting is finished, I’m taking the opportunity to give myself time and space to reflect on the interactions of the past week or so being forced to be amongst others full-time.
Long-time readers, friends, and acquaintances will know that I’m no lover of people. It goes beyond my introversion into a full cynicism of individuals. While I believe in the absolute amazing power of mankind to achieve greatness and be inspirational humans, I doubt most individuals’ ambition, interest, and intention to work toward this. So, my general belief in people as arseholes at the start keeps me from too much disappointment when they prove me right, and allows for pleasant surprise when I am wrong.
A common revelation of a person is in their communications and interactions when amongst new people.
There are the deflectors – those who answer a question with a question because they don’t really want to talk about themselves. This is either from a lack of confidence or a sense of humility presented in not wanting to focus attention on them.
There are the inquisitors – similar to the deflectors, but just start off asking questions of others to keep the conversation away from them, but seeming to be good listeners or showing keen interest in others. Their motives may be sincere interest, or like those above.
There are the ideal conversationalists, who equally ask and answer questions like one might see in the best Wimbledon finale allowing conversation to grow and the art of getting to know others is like watching a beautiful dance performance.
Then, there are the one-man shows – those who share absolutely everything they possibly can whether or not anyone asks them to reveal their opinions or tell tales of their experiences. Not to be a gender-ist, but this is more often than not done by men. No matter the gender identity, the fact is that this kind of person tends to be more common than not.
What is even more interesting to me is when a deflecting inquisitor, like my husband, questions or challenges the one-man show performer. Their response is often what chips away the facade to show who they really are as a person. No matter how old the person is, which we would normally expect to be a sign of maturity, they cannot help but reveal their true colors and level of self-awareness.
We recently had an older individual stay with us. Our judgement of this person had already been slightly colored by a mutual friend providing us with some prior knowledge and information. Still, I did try -somewhat schizophrenically – to give them the benefit of the doubt. However, time and time again it became obvious that this human was not self-aware even though they had 20+ years more of life on me and others. Therefore, responses were often overly embellished or arrogantly hidden with retorts eventually at the level of a high schooler or young 20-something.
This really surprised me, to be honest.
It proved that age does not matter. It is not necessarily the length of time that we walk this earth that helps us to grow and understand the world, but rather the depth in which we allow ourselves to be challenged to learn and improve our quality of lives.
Confirming this doesn’t help my cynicism, admittedly. However, it does add to my understanding of the complex dimensions that make up a human being. While I will still endeavor to respect my elders in the same way I try to respect other people, I also feel as if a new scale of judgment has come into the forefront – how self aware are they?
~T π₯πβοΈ
