Me: My spouse is out, my lovers are all busy, and I’ve got three hours all to myself! I’m ecstatic! I can do so much with that time! And I’m enough of an extravert that I had to announce that.
Meta-lover: You’re silly.
Me (grumbling silently at being misunderstood): No! I’m dead serious! And I chose to tell you because you’d leave me alone after this!
*****
After seriously questioning whether my secondary even likes me (a question I developed because I found him evading me when I sought him out, and not particularly interested in engaging me in the first place), I got sent a protocol on care and feeding of introverts. Common sense, mostly, but it’s nice to be reminded in words how not all people think the same way I do.
Funny how I forget that. I’m well aware that I’m polyamorous in a world full of monogamous people, many of them militantly so, to the point where they feel the right to comment about the immorality of my lifestyle choices (I’m considering arming myself with a 30-second elevator speech about how all of my lovers have made me a better person, and perhaps that makes up for the “immorality” of what happens underneath my pants when they’re not looking and can’t really get the effects anyway). So hiding that is second nature. But there’s something lazy about my thought process, where the things that are unusual about me are so ingrained in my personality and life that I have to expend effort to remember that not all people share the same biases that I do.
I’m not the only one to feel this way. I know, because my mother hands everyone in the room a glass of water as soon as she’s thirsty. I usually end up just looking at it. Life is better when I can effectively respond to people who aren’t exactly like me.
I’m a pretty extreme extravert. Most people are extraverted, just not to the extent that I am. And extraversion comes with its own set of social handicaps, including that I simply can’t evaluate a thought before I express it (I know this is hard for most of you to imagine). The result is that I say a lot of stupid things, in public, that I backtrack immediately. Or after someone else gives me input that I hadn’t considered because my brain was full of that stupid thought it was trying to get out to the world so I could get convinced of its stupidity and move on (funny how I can evaluate other people’s thoughts without expressing them...). Or worse, after a little while. So it seems like I change my mind a lot (I do, but I eventually settle into a well-thought-out and arguable stance, so my protocol eventually works).
Extraverts talk so much that the rest of the world generally seems to know what’s going on in their heads (don’t know what’s going on in an extravert’s head? You aren’t listening. Don’t know what’s going on in an introvert’s head? You haven’t asked. Or waited for the answer). But we still have a slightly unusual and perhaps irrational way of interacting with the world, and so I was going to write up a how-to-deal-with-your-extravert protocol. But it appears I was beaten to it. My girlthing sent me this writeup, which is fairly accurate, if a bit whiny (though I’m admittedly also guilty as charged). So no point in rehashing what’s already published.
The thing I’d really like to emphasize is that I feel like my extraversion prevents me from ever getting any work done (hence my excitement about having 3 hours or so off from people). It’s a horrible Catch-22; without people around, I have no energy to do anything. With people around, I’m so busy thinking that I can’t actually do anything. Sigh. I hope and pray for boring people to sit next to me on public transportation, so I can get some reading done instead of chatting them up. How in the world can I be productive?
Clearly, the answer is partner work.
Here’s an odd side note: people with more of a tendency toward extraversion than I have annoy me greatly. I’m hoping that it’s only a simple fight between my extreme need to express myself before I can really think--so listening to them prevents my own thought processes--and not the alternate hypothesis. I’m dreading having to evaluate the hypothesis that yet a third social handicap on my part is that extraversion makes me annoy everyone who’s lower on the scale than I am.
*****
Questions, comments, or blog posts I should link to? Try me! I’ll evaluate them, even if I have to do it out loud: polysaturated@rocketmail.com.
Meta-lover: You’re silly.
Me (grumbling silently at being misunderstood): No! I’m dead serious! And I chose to tell you because you’d leave me alone after this!
*****
After seriously questioning whether my secondary even likes me (a question I developed because I found him evading me when I sought him out, and not particularly interested in engaging me in the first place), I got sent a protocol on care and feeding of introverts. Common sense, mostly, but it’s nice to be reminded in words how not all people think the same way I do.
Funny how I forget that. I’m well aware that I’m polyamorous in a world full of monogamous people, many of them militantly so, to the point where they feel the right to comment about the immorality of my lifestyle choices (I’m considering arming myself with a 30-second elevator speech about how all of my lovers have made me a better person, and perhaps that makes up for the “immorality” of what happens underneath my pants when they’re not looking and can’t really get the effects anyway). So hiding that is second nature. But there’s something lazy about my thought process, where the things that are unusual about me are so ingrained in my personality and life that I have to expend effort to remember that not all people share the same biases that I do.
I’m not the only one to feel this way. I know, because my mother hands everyone in the room a glass of water as soon as she’s thirsty. I usually end up just looking at it. Life is better when I can effectively respond to people who aren’t exactly like me.
I’m a pretty extreme extravert. Most people are extraverted, just not to the extent that I am. And extraversion comes with its own set of social handicaps, including that I simply can’t evaluate a thought before I express it (I know this is hard for most of you to imagine). The result is that I say a lot of stupid things, in public, that I backtrack immediately. Or after someone else gives me input that I hadn’t considered because my brain was full of that stupid thought it was trying to get out to the world so I could get convinced of its stupidity and move on (funny how I can evaluate other people’s thoughts without expressing them...). Or worse, after a little while. So it seems like I change my mind a lot (I do, but I eventually settle into a well-thought-out and arguable stance, so my protocol eventually works).
Extraverts talk so much that the rest of the world generally seems to know what’s going on in their heads (don’t know what’s going on in an extravert’s head? You aren’t listening. Don’t know what’s going on in an introvert’s head? You haven’t asked. Or waited for the answer). But we still have a slightly unusual and perhaps irrational way of interacting with the world, and so I was going to write up a how-to-deal-with-your-extravert protocol. But it appears I was beaten to it. My girlthing sent me this writeup, which is fairly accurate, if a bit whiny (though I’m admittedly also guilty as charged). So no point in rehashing what’s already published.
The thing I’d really like to emphasize is that I feel like my extraversion prevents me from ever getting any work done (hence my excitement about having 3 hours or so off from people). It’s a horrible Catch-22; without people around, I have no energy to do anything. With people around, I’m so busy thinking that I can’t actually do anything. Sigh. I hope and pray for boring people to sit next to me on public transportation, so I can get some reading done instead of chatting them up. How in the world can I be productive?
Clearly, the answer is partner work.
Here’s an odd side note: people with more of a tendency toward extraversion than I have annoy me greatly. I’m hoping that it’s only a simple fight between my extreme need to express myself before I can really think--so listening to them prevents my own thought processes--and not the alternate hypothesis. I’m dreading having to evaluate the hypothesis that yet a third social handicap on my part is that extraversion makes me annoy everyone who’s lower on the scale than I am.
*****
Questions, comments, or blog posts I should link to? Try me! I’ll evaluate them, even if I have to do it out loud: polysaturated@rocketmail.com.
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