Introvert Born or Made? #5

Part Five The Rebel Introvert

Rebellion in my case didn’t turn me into an extrovert. Rebellion didn’t cure my social anxiety. But retreating into introversion may have been itself a rebellion against the expectation to show up in my mother’s world in the ways she demanded.

Interestingly, that knowledge of mental health and illness, and how these played out in my younger years started with taking graduate courses in psychology while I lived in Europe in the mid to late 70s. Those courses, as well as working with emotionally healthy peers who’d had healthy parenting and learned good personal boundaries, rooted me in my own healing. I don’t think this self-transformation would have come about without the 4500 mile distance and four plus years of separation from my parents.

Another memoir in process, Old World / New Me delves into those years specifically. I hope to have it ready to publish by October 2025.

Nonetheless, questions still remain, even if now only academic. I’m curious about how I became an introvert. Was it nature, nurture, or neglect?  Purely genetic? Innate personality trait? A self-defense response?  Some combo of everything?

Was it that mandate of not commanding attention that molded me into someone too introverted to be comfortable with business networking, big parties, and performing in public?

Was it the memory of being criticized that turned into a fear of being humiliated, and a causal factor for social withdrawal?

Or was introversion simply a neural hard-wiring for one way to manage interpersonal discomforts?

Center stage is a scary place for a lot of introverts. We would much rather stay behind the Emerald City curtains and pull the levers than stand in the spotlight where an audience has expectations of being entertained or enlightened. I shutter even now at the thought of having a room full of eyeballs fixed on me, unless I’m there to serve a specific purpose.

Ironically, when I moved to the suburbs of the Emerald City — the actual nickname for Seattle — I felt more at home than anywhere else I had ever lived in the US.

When in a piano recital at the age of 14 I meant to play a medley of Moon River, Days of Wine and Roses, and Blue Moon, was it being an introvert that caused me to unconsciously go directly from song one to the ending of song three to get off stage as quickly as possible?

Was it why I completely missed my spotlight and stood instead in the shadows against a baby grand piano throughout singing Summertime from Porgy and Bess in a 10^th grade talent show?

Even now in my 70s, I don’t really know.

Nonetheless, I recently had a bit of a revelation. There was something about living in Europe and working for the US Air Force 50 years ago that began to increase my tolerance for social distress and my ability to overcome some of the limitations of being an introvert. From that unintentionally transformative experience I learned that when I have a specific role to fulfill or mission to accomplish, the discomfort of being a focus of attention is diminished.

For those who may be interested in a brief and more academic discussion of introverts and extroverts, I'll be posting my thoughts on that in the last installment of this memoir blog.

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I’m told I make it hard for people to get to know me. It’s not that I strive to be mysterious. I think I just have a higher set point for the kind and amount of personal information that feels appropriate to share with strangers. This is not uncommon for introverts (nor for some trauma survivors).

Consequently, I’ve been called aloof when I think I’m just being observant and not competing for attention. Some consider me shy, which can be true until I know and trust you. I’m not really unfriendly but I do rely on others to be the first to strike up a conversation.

Whether that is a trait hard-wired into my neuropsychology, or a coping mechanism born of growing up with hyper-critical, über-conservative, prone-to-punishment parents, I don’t know. Regardless, I figured out early in life that it was best to keep my thoughts and feelings to myself, lest they be used as weapons against me.

I’ll tell you a secret, though. There is a streak of the wild child lurking beneath my carefully cultivated surface of outward appropriateness. I’ve always leaned towards furtive rebellion. To be honest, being the sort of maverick that is quietly subversive is one of the things I like best about myself.

The rebel introvert side of me comes out mostly in writing. That’s much more satisfying to me than the sort of look at me, look at me daring that requires adrenaline pumping, death defying acts of high energy stupidity like racing a motorcycle over a pile of oil drums.

The risk-taking I do now is mostly via the laptop. In the past, risk-taking included traveling alone through foreign countries where I didn’t speak the language. And it started with marrying as soon as I was 21 to someone I barely knew, in order to not spend another summer with my parents.

Surrounded by Privilege

Classism wasn’t discussed in the social circles I was exposed to growing up, but it didn’t escape my notice that not everyone enjoyed the “advantages”, as it was called back then, that I had. This was generally shrugged off as making wise conservative choices, working hard — albeit at white collar professional level jobs where doors opening for you was taken for granted based on who you knew — sacrificing enjoyment for security, and aggressively saving for a rainy day.

The idea of a plethora of social, economic, educational, inherited supports that allow some to gain wealth and status was thought of as just naturally happening for people who deserved it. The lack of those opportunities in other sectors of society was viewed as personal moral failing.

Despite this Depression era pathway to success which heavily shaped the thinking of both my parents, I felt relatively deprived. Nearly everyone in the neighborhood and many peers at school had swimming pools in their back yard. Dad thought that too high a liability risk. Some had tennis courts, a ridiculous waste of money, he thought, likely because physical fitness wasn’t on his radar.

Almost everyone got a car as soon as they got their drivers license. I didn’t. I hadn’t earned it I was told, without being provided with the conditions that would have fulfilled that qualification. We didn’t have functional bus service out in the suburbs (unless I wanted to walk a mile or more to the closest bus stop).

My ability to go anywhere, meet up with friends, do what passed for normal teen activities in the 60s depended on mom’s willingness to allow me to socialize with kids from families she suspected of being too liberal. And it made me embarrassed. I felt like an outcast among my peers.

It didn’t help that by age 16 all other girls in my subdivision went to private schools. We no longer had the relationships of childhood. They had moved on, made new friends. I wasn’t part of the “popular girls” cliques at my public school.

Maybe my memory on this is faulty, but I can remember only one friend who would pick me up to go shopping or bowling, even though I rarely had pocket money to spend, and had to account for every penny each month for school supplies, cafeteria lunches, sheet music for those music lessons, and albums and 45s for my record player housed in a suitcase.

Having piano lessons and voice lessons seemed more of a chore than an advantage. It seemed like an introvert thing to do until the expectation landed to prove I’d been practicing by playing or singing something in a public recital. I hated that part.

I know how this sounds now. Poor me, poor little rich girl, I can hear some readers thinking sarcastically.  I agree that the sarcasm is warranted.

But in this kind of backhanded way, I learned that keeping up with the Joneses — or literally the Frerichs, Goldfarbs, Donegans, Baileys, Sedgwicks, Bergers, Schnucks, Nutzels, and so on — wasn’t really necessary.

And that was freeing. It took a lot of pressure off for me, as well as fitting in with my rebellious introvert streak. In some way I didn't understand at the time, it also gave me permission to eschew status symbols like the leather purse personalized in brass with the owner's initials, and a complete wardrobe change every year to keep up with the latest fashions.

When Dad had a two story office building built for his growing practice, he continued his introverted approach to life by locating the entry on the backside so as not to face the street. Stairs to the second floor could only be accessed from the entrance interior. And the modern design windows running from the ground to the roof of the two story brick building were not more than eight inches wide.

When asked why he ordered the architect to do that, he said, “I don’t want employees daydreaming the day away by any temptation to look outside”.  

I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. But that sweatshop mentality didn’t really surprise me.  

Later, as I became more politically and psychologically savvy I realized this was a manifestation of a conservative, nose-to-the-grindstone business attitude. It mirrored his lack of empathy and understanding of what employees really need to perform at a consistently high level of productivity.

Even more, the window design reflected his desire to control others. He wasn’t really unkind or cruel in this. Just oblivious to how more than just salary motivates people in the direction you want them to go.

He also didn’t want to encourage potential clients to just drop in without an appointment, as that would “be disruptive to getting work done,” he said. But he gave himself the privilege of going out to meet clients at their workplaces while his employees stayed figuratively chained to their desks and were meant to feel guilty for gazing at a sliver of trees or sky.

The whole building felt like a prison to me.

Years earlier when commissioning the construction of the house I grew up in, he approved the design for the driveway to avoid the front door and wind around to the back-facing garage, without any walkway from the drive to the front door. This made it quite awkward for first time visitors to know where to go. The long cement walk trailing from the front door to the street was seldom used because the street was too narrow to park on.

You have to laugh at that commitment to introverted privacy. His determination to not make it easy for people to drop in on us was impressive.

I’m sure I absorbed a lot of that resistance to social interaction by osmosis if nothing else. When once a friend scolded me for dropping in on them without prior appointment, and demanding I never do it again, that simply made sense to me.

On the other hand, I chuckle at the memory of mom driving around the Midwest in the pre-cell phone era on her antique scouting trips listening to truckers conversing with each other on a CB radio. I can imagine her tsk-tsking when trucker language got too blue. To be sure, the citizen’s band short wave radio was a safety tactic for her in case of a flat tire or other car trouble out in the middle of nowhere. She could be certain someone, on the road or at some stationary location, would always be listening.

But it was also a way for her to fill her seemingly insatiable need to socialize with strangers. She was the complete opposite of dad on that score, and her way of being never felt natural, much less comfortable or appropriate, to me.

In Installment #6 I tell about The Starter Spouse as the great rebellion.

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