Outside in

You know, every child stands for something special. Some children do their best with their fine motor skills and can draw beautiful pictures. Others are great at crawling, standing up, and even walking before their first birthday. As for me, my parents recall that I learned to speak before I turned two years old. And I mean full sentences, no baby talk! It is funny how I still was a baby-looking toddler (because my hair took forever to grow) and people stopped my mother in the supermarket to ask her “But seriously, how old is she?” If I had happened to be born some years later, they might have confused me with the main character of the movie “Look who’s talking”. Besides my natural ability, being an older sister before turning two forced me to adopt some kind of strategy to retain the attention of every grown-up nearby (my baby sister was the loveliest infant!), and I think that’s why I became a chatty, funny, witty, and sometimes unbearably pretentious little girl. 

When I began attending kindergarten, my verbal skills were the golden ticket to leadership and making new friends. Even more, because I grew up in a house where books were treasured and my mom, especially, kept reading to us, I became literate by the time I was 4 and a half years old –something infrequent but not unheard. I remember visiting a library with my kindergarten teacher and my classmates, and later, recreating the shop in our classroom as part of a role-playing game. One boy was the shop assistant; the others sorted books according to their colors, one girl called to be the cashier with pretended money. “Can we write our own books?” I asked the teacher, and she agreed with a smile, which later froze on her face when she realized I was actually writing!

Because I was a natural leader with my kindergarten classmates, I assumed that same role later in elementary school. I was good at math and I could already read books on my own, so the teachers kept reinforcing that role by asking me to participate in class, expressing my thoughts out loud, and congratulating me for things that implied no real effort from my side. Anyway, I believe my way with words is to blame for people believing I’m an extrovert. In addition, I was born in December, a Sagittarius, and despite I don’t believe in horoscopes, most people do. Therefore, I have been described as "a natural leader, always surrounded by friends, a traveler who never wants to stay in one place”, and maybe a part of me bought that image. I became the confident, extrovert girl, full of friends, always happy and enthusiastic, that I believed I would always be. After all, it was written in the stars, wasn’t it?

Spoiler alert: it was not!

Everything was pretty much great with life. And then, I turned twelve.

It was a lousy year. My father moved abroad. My mother remarried a guy I didn’t get along with, my grandfather got sick with cancer, my sister got sick as well (she, unlike my grandfather, at least would recover), and the whole family moved to a big city, Buenos Aires, which I got to loathe since I blamed it for all my miseries. I attended a school in which twelve-year-olds were no longer girls riding their bikes but teenagers going shopping with their credit card extensions and all. To make things even worse, I hit puberty. Or quite the opposite, puberty hit me as if I had been run over by a truck. Barbie dolls were replaced by shiny lipsticks and fashionable outfits. Birthday parties with balloons, cakes, and a bouncy castle turned into dancing with boys (some of them half my height!) and awkward games of “Spin the bottle” or “Seven minutes in Heaven”. For the first time in my life, I was desperately struggling to fit. I no longer had any real friends. I felt ugly, uncomfortable, out of place, and more than anything in the world, lonely.

And then, it occurred to me I just had to act the way I have always acted: smart, witty, talkative. I created some sort of mask to hide my real feelings. I used my way with words to become sarcastic. That made me quite popular again. I kept getting invited to parties, and later, we went to bars and clubs. I always fell in love with boys that I was sure they would not like me back (sometimes they already had a girlfriend, other times they were not into girls at all). I lied to myself when I said I just had no luck in love when I was avoiding a real relationship because I was afraid someone would notice who I really was and tell the world (at that point in my life, high school): a shy, introverted girl, who loved reading books and writing short stories and poems more than anything in the world, someone who would sometimes lie and tell their classmates she was grounded to skip a party and remain at home watching an old black and white film on TV, or going to sleep early because I had to study for an exam.

Eventually, I met my first love, a guy that was into books and music, and who provided me a perfect excuse to avoid going to clubs and bars. I started attending college, where my new group of friends preferred having intellectual talks over a cup of coffee to going somewhere loud and flashy. I truly felt like myself again, but now I embraced my identity as an introvert who, only because of her verbal skills, can pose as an extrovert without too much trouble.

As a matter of fact, this is the first time I get to put all of this into words. Again, thanks to my love for writing! I love talking with almost anyone about world politics, feminism, ecology, music, board games, cats, TV series, and, of course, books. And yet, I rarely discuss something personal with anyone outside my closest circle of friends and family. By the way, no, I didn't marry my first boyfriend, but I did end up with a fellow introvert (although he's a classic one, and when our friends do come over, I'm still the one who does most of the talking!) As for Sagittarius’ love of traveling abroad, I indeed like going to places, but mostly I search for quiet forests, empty beaches where I can lie down on the sand undisturbed with a book on my hands, or little towns that I can later turn into sceneries for my short stories. I don’t look forward to visiting crowded cities or monuments and I hate going on planes!

And that’s how, at 39, I can recognize myself as an introvert though many people would easily describe me as an extrovert. And you know what the best part is? I don’t care. I like the way I am!