I was pretty angry with you for a while, there. I've been frustrated for the past two weeks or so because you guys never comment and I was starting to feel like I was blogging for absolutely no reason, to absolutely no one.
The first half of that statement is true. I don't have a reason to blog. I don't teach people things or sell things. I've told you this before. The only reason you guys read this blog is because I post lots of GIFs and word myself relatively well for an immature, twenty year-old, American girl. And because I inundate your Facebook feed with it.
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| ...Oh, so that's how I ended up here? Some sort of voodoo, mind magic, Facebook spell. ... |
But I was starting to take everything a bit too personally, as I'm prone to. I was being self-absorbed, another propensity of mine, thinking that somehow your world ought to revolve around my silly, pointless blog and the things I write in it.
Anyway, it's not your fault. It's not like you did anything. For whatever reason, I expected you to prioritize me above your own life, and when you didn't I felt like it because I was doing something wrong. I stand so very corrected.
I attribute this mostly to my personality type. I don't know who you think I am, either from face-to-face interactions or by reading this blog/listening to my complaints on Twitter, etc. You'd probably have two very different opinions of Dainger if you only talked to me in person or only saw me on the internet.
What I mean to say is that I am an example of that strange phenomenon known commonly as The Socially Awkward are Inebriated by the Internet and Become Charming Buggers Online. Or, TSAIIBCBO... Yeah. It's like all of the quiet kids found the internet and with it, the courage to release their inner Level 17428 Mage, or their inner Charming Bugger, Rico Suave, whoever it is they become when there is an Internet between them and the actual visage of another human being.
What I mean is that Dainger is just a facet of me. Dainger is James Bond, Dain is kind of socially inept at times and prefers to code her blog alone in her room for hours than interact with human beings. Dainger is a woman of action, Dain is a girl of inaction and introspection. Put them together and you have this entirely weird creature with freckles and strange ideas who writes a blog.
I'm sure you've heard the terms 'introvert' and 'extrovert'. You probably have a pretty good idea of which category you fall under. If you don't, maybe you should take a Myers-Briggs Personality Test or at least go Google each one and figure it out. I think it's a worthwhile thing to know about yourself, and here's why.
I was Stumbling today, like I do every day, and I Stumbled (this is referring to the website Stumbleupon, if you're wondering what I'm talking about) on this article. I've been seeing a recent outcropping of "Introvert Power" type articles, probably because my Stumbleupon sees that I like reading them, and this one is not unlike the others that I've read.
It's true that we live in an extroverted society, but I think that with the internet there's an increasing amount of introverts who find their inner James Bond or Level 17428 Mage. Introverts aren't necessarily the types of people who can find the right words out loud, but online, without the stress of reading constant sensory information pouring out from one or many people we're conversing with, we can speak mostly unhindered. I say we because I know that I'm not just shy, although I am a little of that. Introversion is, indeed, my way of thinking.
"Introverts prefer quiet, minimally stimulating environments, while extroverts need higher levels of stimulation to feel their best. Stimulation comes in all forms – social stimulation, but also lights, noise, and so on," is what Susan Cain, author of "Quiet: The Power of Introverts", says. If you're an introvert, this should make sense. In fact, the whole article should point out things that make sense but maybe you've never put together before, like why you don't have the social stamina of the extroverted, talkative people of the world. It's not that you don't like people (although maybe you don't), it's that you're so busy taking in all of the stimuli that it's stressful and exhausting to carry on a conversation while you're doing it.
I found this website while I was Stumbling, too, and I'm a little wary to believe everything that Carl King says, he brings up an interesting point. What if it's not just a personality trait, but a chemical thing?
"If the science behind the book is correct, it turns out that Introverts are people who are over-sensitive to Dopamine, so too much external stimulation overdoses and exhausts them. Conversely, Extroverts can’t get enough Dopamine, and they require Adrenaline for their brains to create it. Extroverts also have a shorter pathway and less blood-flow to the brain. The messages of an Extrovert’s nervous system mostly bypass the Broca’s area in the frontal lobe, which is where a large portion of contemplation takes place."
And why is being introverted such a bad thing, anyway? Another thing that the Scientific American interview brought up was the stress on groupwork in our society, although it's been proven that people aren't half as productive in a group brainstorm as they are on their own.
Susan Cain puts it this way:
"Forty years of research shows that brainstorming in groups is a terrible way to produce creative ideas. The organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham puts it pretty bluntly: The 'evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups. If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.'"But mostly, I want to tell you introverts that you don't need to change who you are. Yes, we live in an extroverted world, and it will often be expected of us to fill extroverted shoes. It sucks, I know. I've been there. You've been there. We've all been there. It's wrong of society, I think, to think that being Rico Suave, The Charming Bugger is more appropriate than being Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing alone in the woods. I also think it's wrong of us to think that we're somehow naturally doomed to failure in the "real world" because it's a real effort for us to be charming and gregarious sometimes. It might've been true in the past, and it's still largely true today, that being extroverted is a prized possession in nearly every work and academic environment. Nearly any environment, really.
Still, I think we introverts can prove something. Such a large majority of the wildly creative minds in world history were introverted. I'm fascinated by the minuscule portion of people in the world known as savants, incredible geniuses in math, memory, art, nearly everything. Yet, although these savants have incredible memories and incredible propensities for certain things, they're also socially disconnected, usually in the form of Asperger's or Autism. It's not always a severe form (think Rainman), but it seems to be the great trade-off for indescribable capabilities in a limited area of study.
Kim Peek, the real Rainman, remembered every book he read and memorized thousands of years of history, but he couldn't dress himself in the morning or live on his own. Savants have unlocked, sometimes rather forcefully, capacities of the brain that are potentially in all of us, but often struggle to remember the way into town or how to recognize facial expressions. The world, bursting with stimuli, is too much for them to handle. In a way of thinking, they are the world's experts on concentration, and they don't even do it consciously. Their brain shuts out all the stimuli of the world, which is how it can achieve incredible feats of computation, memorization, and art/music.
What I'm getting at is that introverts are great at concentrating, when there isn't so much going on around them. I guess what I was trying to connect was the thought of how the savant's brain works with the brain of the introvert, and how creative both can be.
Have you ever thought about that? What makes a genius a genius? What if it comes down to mere concentration? What if you have, locked within your brain, the capability to multiply four-digit numbers almost instantaneously? What if you have the capability to look at an overhead view of a city only once, just for a few minutes, and then be able to draw it accurately, down to the windows in the buildings? What if there's a secret spot in your brain that, if accessed, would give you the power to hear the music in a train gathering speed?
Don't underestimate yourself, introvert. Perhaps you're closer to genius than you think.
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