Introvert Born or Made? #2

Part Two:

Behind the Mask

It was the humid Midwest summer of 1954 when the two car garage, two story appearing, full but unfinished basement, brick ranch style house I grew up in was finished. I say appearing because the second story was never completed, remaining a splintery rough attic with exposed fiberglass insulation, but nonetheless complying with the subdivision’s requirement that every house look significantly impressive.

This looking versus being dichotomy was a pervasive psycho-social corrosive in those years, one that likely spurred my early awareness of and disgust for the hypocrisies I later rebelled against.  

My father had had that house built out in the rapidly developing and increasingly wealthy St. Louis Missouri suburb of Frontenac. Countryside Lane was a neighborhood of upper middle class professionals, houses on my lollipop shaped subdivision all occupied carefully landscaped lots. Many of the families there had nearly Olympic-sized swimming pools. Several had tennis courts. The Baileys whose property adjoined our backyard kept a fat brown pony in their yard, which all the kids fed, petted, and fought over for rides.

I was four when we moved in from the solidly middle class next door township of Kirkwood, thrilled to have a quarter-acre “forest” on our property outside one of my bedroom windows, and another whole grassy acre on which the house was centered.

A large shady climbing tree anchored the end of the long sidewalk from the double front doors to the barely two-lane wide road of the subdivision. I spent many an afternoon up in that tree — an elm, I think — imagining being a pioneer scout on the lookout for marauders, or a writer researching the goings on in the houses across from mine.

Down the street from our house where the road split to form the lollipop’s circle sat a replica of the Tara mansion from the movie Gone With the Wind. Sweet smelling honeysuckle vines threaded through their white wood fence along the edge of their back yard, providing a seductive sniff but don’t pluck invitation.

As stately as that house looked driving up the lane, there was always a kind of feeling of mystery about it. I rarely saw anyone coming from or going into that house. But it was an architectural reminder that good manners and traditions mattered, were perpetually expected, and were signs of polite, if surface-focused society.

If you hold up a big, flat lollipop and imagine a clock face on the circle, our house was at about the 2:30 position, with just one other between the straight up 6 o'clock Tara and ours. The in-between house was a huge, newer, three story with stone facade, and a big semi circle drive cutting through their front yard before winding around to the garage, pool and big party patio in back. But their children were much older, and I never got to know them.

The end of the lollipop stick extending from the hard candy round part flowed off of Geyer Road connecting Frontenac with Kirkwood. Otis Brown Stables was situated on the left of our lane as we drove up the stick to the circle, providing that lovely pungent fragrance of equine manure. As I got older, I spent a lot of time at the stables, mucking out stalls, currying the jumpers and other thoroughbreds, and exercising horses whose owners hadn’t visited for a while.

When there were big parades or other events in downtown St. Louis, the Anheuser Busch Clydesdales got boarded at Brown Stables. The neighborhood kids, including me, were allowed to pet them and walk them around when supervised, but otherwise it was hands off the beer wagon stars.

Bill Mauldin, a famed St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper political cartoonist, two time Pulitzer Prize winner, and freelance writer / illustrator for Life magazine, Saturday Evening Post, and Sports Illustrated lived across from the stables on our lane. An auspicious entry to my world, though I never actually saw him.

All in all, this was a low crime, high status, no public transportation that far out from the city, comfortable area to grow up in. But the dark shadow of Countryside Lane was that it was a redlined development.

No African-Americans, no Asians, no Jews allowed. Folks from India and the Arab states hardly had a presence in Frontenac back then, but at least 75% of my school district was populated by Jewish families. And that was the beginning of my curiosity about cultures and customs different from my own.

But first I had to live through the suppression of diversity that was the climate of the 50s and 60s until the civil rights movement dovetailed with the second wave women’s liberation era coinciding with my own high school coming of age years.

Formation

If the old adage of train up a child in the way he [sic] should go and when he [sic] is old, he [sic] shall not depart from it was the goal, my parents failed to achieve it big time.

Thank goddess I say gleefully, proving my point.

I was raised in the waning children should be seen and not heard parenting era. It was a strong, repressive marinade that sunk in like this dictum was a primary rule of survival. A perfect way to raise sheep, I thought at some point in my teens as soon as the independent consciousness synapses in my brain began to blossom. I could be justly accused of a lot of things, but being an unthinking follower of anything is not one of them.

Don’t interrupt the grown ups was another message I got early in life. A perfect rule for stifling assertiveness, not to mention extroversion. As long as the house isn’t burning down, nothing a child has to say really matters. Perhaps this was one of several parental messages that served to keep my thoughts to myself, saved up for my writing later in life.

Speak only when spoken to. Don’t contradict or question your elders’ claims — especially about fairness, seriously held beliefs, traditions and differences stumbled across in other cultures thanks to World Book Encyclopedia, and historical facts. Yep, questioning and contradicting always got me into trouble. I learned quickly that it was safer to keep my true thoughts to myself, processing opinions in well hidden diaries.

If the intent of this kind of parenting was to produce an introvert, maybe it worked. If being an introvert is a learned response rather than innate personality trait, perhaps it could be said that I was an excellent student.

I can’t remember being the type of kid who had a lot of friends. Nor do I remember agonizing over that. I think I’ve always preferred self-entertaining activities like reading, writing, daydreaming, solitary walks, singing and accompanying myself on the piano, and did I mention reading and writing?

I’ve never depended on being with other people in order to have a good time. Usually the opposite was true, a classic sign of an introvert. Or, a trauma response to a parenting style that clashed with my personality. Or, a sign of adoption attachment disorder.

Pick your diagnosis. Any and all of these could apply.

The isolated exceptions at ages 11 and 12 were the team sports of softball, soccer, and field hockey. But I didn’t have a choice about joining in on school sports. They were a part of the required gender segregated gym class and after school activity in fifth and sixth grades. And to be sure, the attraction wasn’t the running or the scoring or the team cooperation. Those weren’t the highlights for me.

Likewise, there was no value for me in striving to become an MVP or team captain. I didn’t need to be a star athlete, feted and carried on the shoulders of my teammates.  Those extrovert-like goals didn’t motivate me.

But at some level I also felt a sense of responsibility to do my part, to play my role without the ego need to stand out among others — a clear Capricorn sun sign trait, if not one typical of introverts.

It was the sound and sensation of thwacking a ball with a stick, or kicking one, that was enormously satisfying. I didn’t realize it then, although now I can see I was experiencing a sense of empowerment that far exceeded a simple participation in a sport. The physical reverberations going up my arms or legs to resonate in my core gave me a sense of invulnerability beyond youth’s illusion of being infallible.

 A more minor piece of the satisfaction of scoring a goal for me was seeing evidence in real time of my innate understanding that right timing combined with pathways of opportunity would transform a personal action into a highly sought result. It wasn’t scoring a goal or making the pass to another player who kicked or hit the ball between the goalposts. Scoring was a side benefit of acting on an intuitive strategy.

But the primary payoff for me was creating something more visceral, more personal, more internal. What could be more motivating for an introvert?

Later, in my 20s at a honkytonk in Germany, I got the same aural gratification from playing pool alone or against someone else. I didn’t care if I pocketed the ball I aimed at. The sharp crack of each instance of the cue ball smacking into a stripe or solid was the desired repetitive outcome.

And perhaps it was the subliminal and accepted expression, otherwise forbidden, of stored up anger that gave me pleasure.

In installment #3: Bad Influence I dig into how I might have modeled my introversion from my (adoptive) father's example.

---

Published by Liminal Realities. Copyright 2025 by Deah Curry. All rights reserved.

Cover Photo by Caleb Woods via Snappa