Why introverts rule the world.

Our lives are shaped by our personality. Our personality affects almost everything, from our life choices, friendships, career paths to our taste in music and hobbies. I’m often curious about the introvert-extrovert spectrum.

In my heart, I’m always a happy introvert but growing up, sometimes I’ve felt saddened that we got the shorter end of the stick. There sometimes seems like a lot of things I would love to be a part of but I simply feel too anxious or stressed out to be able to do it. This is probably why I’ve always loved ‘Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani’ and deep down feel like I could relate to the character of Naina Talwar. As much as I’d like to say I’m trying to be more self accepting and let go of inhibitions, I’ve found that self acceptance, like many other things in life is an ongoing process. I’m learning and growing but slowly.

Around two years ago, one of my professors wrote me a letter of recommendation where she mentioned that I’m soft spoken. It was a well written recommendation but that sentence worried me to no end. In a field like architecture, that sort of thing doesn’t exactly make the cut and I’ve often found myself worrying if I would ever be good enough to make a career out of it, in a world where extroverts are the cultural ideal.

Social media and the stereotypes set over the years have conditioned us to believe that we need to be bold in order to be great or be highly sociable in order to be happy. Extroversion is made to seem appealing, like be the ideal way to be, whereas introversion seems the opposite; like there is something inherently wrong with it.

I’ve recently been reading Susan Cain’s ‘Quiet: The Power of Introverts’ and I came across the beautiful story of a woman, Rosa Parks. I’m quoting the story directly from the book here:

Montgomery, Alabama. December 1, 1955.

Early evening. A public bus pulls to a stop and a sensibly dressed woman in her forties gets on. She carries herself erectly, despite having spent the day bent over an ironing board in a dingy basement tailor shop at the Montgomery Fair. department store. Her feet are swollen, her shoulders ache. She sits in the first row of the Colored section and watches quietly as the bus fills with riders. Until the driver orders her to give her seat to a white passenger. The woman utters a single word that ignites one of the most important civil rights protests of the twentieth century, one word that helps America find its better self.
The word is “No.”  The driver threatens to have her arrested.
“You may do that,” says Rosa Parks.
A police officer arrives. He asks Parks why she won’t move.
“Why do you all push us around?” she answers simply.
“I don’t know,” he says. “But the law is the law, and you’re under arrest.”

On the afternoon of her trial and conviction for disorderly conduct, the Montgomery Improvement Association holds a rally for Parks at the Holt Street Baptist Church, in the poorest section of town. Five thousand gather to support Parks’s lonely act of courage. They squeeze inside the church until its pews can hold no more. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. addresses the crowd. “There comes a time that people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression,” he tells them. 
He praises Parks’s bravery and hugs her. She stands silently, her mere presence enough to galvanize the crowd. The association launches a city-wide bus boycott that lasts 381 days. The people trudge miles to work. They change the course of American history.
I had always imagined Rosa Parks as a stately woman with a bold temperament. But when she died in 2005, obituaries recalled her as soft-spoken, sweet, and small in stature. They said she was “timid and shy” but had “the courage of a lion.” They were full of phrases like “radical humility” and “quiet fortitude.”

The United States Congress has called her “the first lady of civil rights” and “the mother of the freedom movement”. Rosa Parks inspires me, because we’ve been conditioned to think that introverts are synonymous with soft, feeble, and shy but that’s not all we are nor is it always true. Her autobiography titled ‘Quiet Strength’ challenges us to question our assumptions. Why shouldn’t quiet be strong? And what else can quiet do that we don’t give it credit for?

Rosa Parks was an introvert, truly soft-spoken and quiet but with the courage of a lion. Not only her, but some of the other great ideas, arts and inventions of these world have come from the quiet, the silent and the lone thinkers (Eleanor Roosevelt, Al Gore, Warren Buffett, Gandhi etc). These people have not achieved in spite of being introverts, but simply because of it. (Read that sentence again)

Introverts, most certainly rule the world in our own ways! You do you, boo! ♥

– A from TAD

 

PS: Do read the book, if you haven’t already. It is evocative to an introvert like me, and if you are an extrovert, it would certainly help you understand us introverts better.