I was planning for Light And Fluffy Friday Post today, but that’s just not where my headspace is at. Instead of being all YAY HERE ARE THINGS I’M LOVING*, I’m actually staring somewhat morosely out the window wondering why I feel so flat.
* Which, there are many things I’m loving right now but aside from ‘tea’ they are all pretty abstract and don’t really lend themselves to links and so forth?
At least, I was until I remembered that extroversion is a Thing.
Y’all, I’ve gone from INTENSE contact with often about 80 people every day – and I don’t mean, like, working in a room with 80 people, I mean there were 80 people in the day I was expected to have individual conversations with wherein I needed to at least roughly have an idea of where they were at in terms of skills, mindset and wellbeing – to now working from home the last three weeks with NO intense people contact outside of my spouse & two kids.
I’m leaning hard on Instagram and my stories have become a wonderful outlet for me to share (and I so so so so so appreciate Every. Single. Person who views them, and even more when y’all actually interact and vote on polls and reply to me <3 <3 <3) but it’s not quite the same as, well, Intense People Contact.
It’s not like I’m seeing no one: last Saturday a friend dropped by in the evening, last Sunday another friend was over for a couple of hours. But last weekend feels like a month ago, there’s no one scheduled to visit this weekend (though I may need to visit someone to do my laundry, we’ll see**), and even despite my longing for Intense People Contact right now, I’m still horrified by the ordeal that is Small Talk With Strangers Or Acquaintances.
** Renovations, what can I say.
So when I heard a podcast recently that talked about different TYPES of extroversion, things clicked into place. There are the strong introverts, who are perfectly fine with only casual human contact, possibly only even occasionally; there are the strong extroverts, who can’t handle being alone at all. And then there are the rest of us, placed along the spectrum, and the kind of extrovert I am is the one that craves depth over breadth; shallow human contact, no matter how much of it, doesn’t fill my people well. But a couple of hours of deep conversation about meaningful or interesting ideas? Yes, please and thank you.
The classroom was perfect for that, and I miss it almost like oxygen. But the lifestyle that accompanied it was, for me and for the many, many others currently leaving the profession, utterly unsustainable.
So now I’m left wondering: how do I keep the baby while ditching the bathwater? How do I craft a lifestyle that balances my need for Intense People Contact with… everything else in life?
I don’t know. But I guess I’m here to find out.