Work in Progress Part II

Oops, thought I’d posted this, but it was sitting in Drafts, just now.

Being introverted doesn’t bother me, anymore. As an adult, I have come to accept and even embrace my uniqueness and quietude. There’s a book called Quiet that a friend recommended years ago, that I have somewhere in my house, that I need to read. It talks about how our culture favors the outgoing, and calls for the need to accept both personality types on a large scale.

When I was young, though, I felt lots of pressure to try to be extroverted. It was simply not in my DNA, and I think intuitively, I knew that.

Nevertheless, I wished and prayed all the time to be more outgoing. And popular.

Popularity was important to me for a long time. Popular girls dressed better than anyone else and set all the trends. All the boys I liked were popular, and only dated the five popular girls in our grade.

My taste in the opposite sex did evolve, thank goodness, as I grew into a young woman, to include intelligence, sensitivity, sense of humor, charisma, and so on. When you’re 12, all you really care about is who has the best hair or darkest, smoldering brown eyes—12-year-old me, anyway.

I finally gave up trying to conform sometime around the end of sophomore year. Incidentally, my music tastes changed about the same time, as Katey introduced me to Green Day, Nine Inch Nails, They Might Be Giants, and Alice In Chains (they changed again in college, to Tori Amos, Bjork, Garbage, Portishead, Pink Floyd, Foo Fighters, and pretty much haven’t changed since then).

Katey and I were the class weirdos: drama freaks. No matter what, I was always an outcast in school. But at least now I had other outcast friends.

We were total opposite extremes, and somehow, we complemented each other perfectly. She was like the yin to my yang. She was nonjudgmental of my introversion, and I was able to keep pace with her rapid chatter. We even co-wrote short stories for class. I don’t have them, anymore, wish I did.

After high school there followed some TV shows, such as Daria and Freaks and Geeks, that glorified nonconformity and exposed “popularity” for the farce it is. But it was too late for Katey and me. Love, love, love both series, though. Freaks and Geeks is my favorite show of all time.

Occasionally, I have become an outcast in work situations, but only in very toxic environments that mimic high school. And certainly not here.

There was a situation, let’s just call it the Bitch Tree Center, where I actually felt bullied by a couple of coworkers. But I was only there for six weeks.

I’ve worked many, many places in my adult life, and, as far as I can tell, most people like me. I am a good worker. I am easy to get along with and talk to. Unless I have a headache.

As a fair-skinned introvert, I do blush a lot, though, and I hate it. Speaking, even informally, in front of a group or being around my crush when I was younger was torture for me. I could turn bright red (and often did) at any time.

Anyway, I think I’ve just got to not care about Sally not liking me. I’ll bet once she sees I really don’t care, that’s when she’ll warm up to me. I just have a feeling.