Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

introversion

i am sounding out the silence

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A few weeks ago I visited Rabi in NYC. It was an relatively ad hoc trip – I owed her a visit, and she was free for a few days. Things just fell into place.

Rabi and I are not the bloggers we once were; both of us allow our domains to fall into silence for weeks or months at a time, when the span used to be days or mere hours. One might imagine, then, that we had more to talk about than usual, having missed so much errata, minutia, and other blog-worthy details of life.

Not quite. In fact, upon my departure I had the distinct impression that we had spoken markedly less than in any previous encounter. The quantity changed, though the quality of the conversations wasn’t any more or less.

It made me think: do I speak less now, in general?

I’m quite sure that I do. At work I am almost entirely autonomous, and spend long stretches of my day quietly creating project plans or proofreading. Elise and I operate on slightly less words than we used to, if only because it takes less to communicate our meaning these days. And, I despise the phone, as ever. Yet, even in public situations – in meetings or dinners or parties – I have the perception that I’m saying a lot less than I used to.

The next question in sequence is: why? The easy answer is “circumstance,” but all of the circumstances that surround me are ones that I manufactured for myself, which leads us to a second “why.”

Do I just have less to say? Am I becoming less self-involved as I (presumably) mature? Am I growing more comfortable with myself, and in turn with the silences that surround me?

Does it mean that I’m listening more? Or, am I more introverted – less likely to expose myself to others?

Looking back into the microcosm of Rabi and I, walking in circles in the East Village and around the Seaport, I can see a little of each reason. I’m sure there are days where one dominates, and others where they are equal.

It just makes me wonder: where did all those other words go?

NaBloPoMo Round-Up #9: M Defeats, O Redeems

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I originally had intentions of doing M and S tonight, but the Ms really took the fight out of me. It was all I could do to squeeze in Os as originally scheduled and still write a normal post before midnight.

In honor of the nine-thousand and fifty-two mommy blogs i read in the Ms, i actually performed some baking, because i have finally convinced myself that the cookie dough is tastier baked* than raw.

* where baked does not equal microwaved into a smoking heap

Let the games begin. [Read more…] about NaBloPoMo Round-Up #9: M Defeats, O Redeems

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Yesterday was impossibly full… two or three different days all slipped deceptively into the packaging of one. Shopping turned into lunch, which turned into a deep conversation about what made me who i am, which turned into a concert for my mom that ended with a concert that pulled out notes and chords from places i’ve never been before. That was one day… happy deep family day. Then there was my day to myself, with guitar and internet and music and napping and food. And, then, came my day with friends, which typically started out happy and fun and quickly descended into misery. I’m usually introverted enough towards the middle and end of big parties, but this time i had headphones with me so i just turned on the good bits and let everyone at the party do their miserable little social dance to the sounds between my ears. Eventually i got tired of waiting for the people i wanted to be with (the story of my life) and i went out on the front step and turned it up all the way until finally i set off for the apartment.

So many blogging things happened in there… things i’ll have to say eventually for me to make more sense. Somehow i explained to my mother exactly why i like to be thin and why i like the girls who i like and why i have to be successful at something and she understood it all with this wane little smile and tears welling in her eyes. I can’t imagine what it must have been like seeing me from the outside… i wanted to thank her for everything and so when she asked me to play “under my skin” i shut my eyes and opened up and poured things into it that she had never even heard before, and afterwards she sortof just stared at me and i was just sweating and breathing and smiling because somehow i opened the song up again just when i thought i had used it all up.


It’s hard to quantify 20 years in any kind of way, but somewhere in between my nearly mathematical proof that i’ve never had a male role model before Peter Mulvey and my gut-wrenching concert i think i was having a happy birthday. The only happy one out of the three.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5862553/

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Last night i didn’t get back to the apartment until nearly ten, having gone for well over half a day without much of a moment’s rest at all. I wearily made it up the two flights of stairs to our parlor, took a few minutes to exchange pleasantries with the roommates, mounted the third (steepest) set of stairs to my bedroom and then rolled into my bed. I was nearly out like a light while from downstairs i was being asking if i wanted to walk down the block and get some sushi, and i have no recollection of anyone returning with a meal in hand.

It occurs to me as my first week living with Linsday and Erika (and, for the moment, Jack) wears on that sharing a house with me must be a terribly surprising. Before Jack and Linsday moved into Erika’s old apartment (the Player’s House) they had been there so often that they were roommates by extension long before they were ever roommates by virtue of having a key. They were known quantities. While they surely had funny quirks about the kitchen or the bathroom or keeping tidy, the experience of sharing space with them was not a revelation of any kind.

On the other hand, there is me… alternately extroverted and introverted at parties, sporadically but dedicatedly a participant in theatre, and a music enthusiast who refuses to concede his theoretical superiority of intelligence. With every tiny interaction i have with Erika in the kitchen or while knocking on Linsday’s bedroom door i realize that anything i could be doing would be a surprise to them, because i don’t know what they might be willing to expect based on what they’ve known of me so far. Tiny things like my willingness to attack the dishes if asked, or the controlled cyclone of my room, or my quick retreat to the seclusion of loud music and a game of Snood before bed… all of them seem strange enough to me but i can’t imagine trying to fit them into the strangely perceived context of me that they must already have.

The other side of this thought process is that any given set of roommates alters one’s behaviour in a different kind of way. Kenny kept me cheery and social, Victor left me territorial and bitchy, Matt trained me to apathetic and sedentary. Each of these influences weren’t exactly surprises, since my roommates were unflappable, disrespectful, and disinterested in that order. So, i’m wondering how my new housemates are seeing me (especially Linsday, who i’ve been around the most both in and out of the apartment) and how i’ll subtly change as the year goes on.

Isn’t it funny how i’m sitting here waiting to find out who i am? Maybe it just seems amusing from the inside…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5501530/

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The dichotomy of my own personality can occasionally shock me. This week I haven’t even set foot in my own apartment before 11pm every night, and all of the intervening hours are spent in the presence of other people. Imagining little self-absorbed self-involved me wandering around from one group setting to another is somewhat unsettling, even though I almost love it. I know I love getting back to my apartment just long enough to check me mail (real mail, not email) and then crash out in the body-shaped dent in my bed full of pillows. I love seeing people I care about every day.

At the same time, I feel empty. My normal enthusiasm for everything from crossing the street to opening doors for people is gone. People keep asking me what’s wrong, and even though nothing feels that way obviously they can read it on my face. I feel disconnected from my songs, even after I spent literally the entire weekend holed up in my apartment with my guitar recovering from all the time I spent outside of it last week.

When I took the Myers-Briggs personality indicator last summer I strongly leaned to one side or the other on every category except Introvert/Extrovert, where my score was nearly centered. All of the people who took the test with me were shocked because they couldn’t imagine me as an introvert, but anyone who really knew me well just chuckled knowingly. I don’t know how to make time for other people and myself in my life, and so right now I’m trapped at one extreme knowing that I’d feel just as trapped at the other. The reason I’m involved in so many performance groups and activities is because I know they’ll always get me outside of my room, and that I’ll enjoy myself while doing them. But, sometimes I give away too much of that time, leaving me feeling as though I’m lacking my own energy and opinions, and I try to fix it by spending whole days holed away from anything else. But, it doesn’t work. I played guitar for nine hours on Saturday with no interruption, but it doesn’t feel like I got anywhere. I need to distribute those little pieces of personal time around my schedule for them to mean anything.

Of course, I can’t necessarily distribute. I know people who do what I’ve been doing every night, and who have been doing it for years now. They’re happy people, but I suppose they just scored higher on the extrovert scale than I did, because I can be just as miserable and depressed while I’m surrounded with friends as I am sitting alone in my apartment. Lately I feel like I’m just circling some sort of desperate emotional low, and that as long as I keep myself moving I won’t have to notice it. But, at this point, moving might just be getting me closer.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/05/3579857/