During my desperate search to heal myself some years ago, I went to see an analyst in New York City, we met on and off for nearly 10 years, she had the most beautiful offices on Park Avenue, she was a beautiful and dignified woman, a relative of Anna Freud. I was crazy then, and nearly drove her crazy. She taught me much about myself. She is still alive although quite old and we still communicate once in awhile.
During one of our sessions – analysis was one of the most riveting experiences of my life – I told her that almost everyone I knew was suddenly eager to identify themselves as an introvert or an extrovert, and they kept asking me which one of these things I was. I didn’t care to be either, I told her, what do I say?
I remember her looking at me for awhile, and smiling. “Tell them you are Jon.”
Our country seems to me to be going through a deepening labeling disorder.
This has isolated me in many ways, as I truly hate being labeled, and everyone has a label I resist or dislike. The essence of identity to me is the right to identity myself, and if I need any labels, I can do the labeling myself. The “left-right” epidemic is to me, a disease, the shrinking and cheapening of the American mind.
I cannot imagine any thinking person agreeing to be tagged as on the “left” or the “right” as if there were only two ways of thinking about the world. I would as soon put a sticker on my forehead that said “brain close, first death.” I feel the same way about introverts and extroverts.
I have never known a truly intelligent person or any kind of original thinker who would voluntarily put narrow labels on him or herself. But then, that is not really true. I know a lot of smart people who do.
To me, thinking is about opening one’s mind, not closing it, looking for different ideas, not clinging blindly to the same ones. The intellectual and the seeker wants most to hear from the people who disagree, not from those who always agree. Those are the ones who can teach me.
Many of the people I meet – many of my friends – are quick to tell me with pride that they are an introvert or an extrovert, as if that relieves them of the need to explain (or perhaps know) themselves. Many have eagerly submitted to the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator test, available everywhere labels are sold or given away, to tell them who they are. As if they could not possibly know themselves.
Most people seem to want to be seen as introverts, polls have found, it is better to be seen as a shy person as shy person who has overcome a sensitive disposition to go out and face the world. That seems more exotic. Few people outside of CEO’s or politicians seem to want to call themselves extroverts, there is perhaps something vaguely self-promoting or arrogant about it, as if one is bragging or asking to be knocked down a peg.
I have a friend who is one of the most engagingly social people I have ever met, she is always talking to people, huddling with them, reaching out to them, interacting with them, gossiping with them. She loves people and people love her. She is so busy I rarely get to talk to her, even when we are together, and recently, she proudly and with a straight face told me that she has always been an introvert, she was happy to take the Meyers-Briggs test and pass with flying colors.
And for sure, she loves to be alone and work alone and think alone. Can we be trans-extroverts or introverts?
But Meyers-Briggs settles the issue, she does not have to look any farther. This has happened to me often, some of the most curious and outgoing people I know instantly claim to be introverted, as if to deny their very obvious and pronounced nature.
I have another good friend I admire greatly who writes, paints, preaches, helps a score of people in need, works hard to raise his children, travels endlessly, takes wonderful photographs and writes beautiful poems. Quite often, he does all of these things in the same day. He insists he is an introvert.
He can also be guarded and shy, and he also can be and often is alone. He does his best work there.
He has the perfect right to call himself anything he wants, but mostly I am coming to see that labeling ourselves is a basic and elemental human need. Everyone seems to want and need to do it.
Something in each of us seems to want a tag. I am the odd one. Perhaps I am an oddrovert.
I think in our oddly disconnected world, everyone wants to be the brooding thinker, not the social conqueror. I saw an interview with a famous movie star this week – yes, I read E! online – known for her staggering ego and beauty and global socializing. She has always been an introvert, she told a reporter with a straight face. “I just need to be alone.”
I cannot imagine why anyone would tag themselves in either way any more than with “left-right” labels, but then I am strange and do not generally find any good labels to pin on myself other than impulsive, obsessive and crazy. Those are good for me.
The “introvert-extrovert” thing was spawned by famed psychologist Carl Yung in the 20’s and in recent weeks I have finally gotten around to reading his theories on extroversion and introversion. I am not shocked to find he has been seriously misrepresented by people for their own purposes. He suggested in his writing that every human being has both an extroverted side and an introverted side, with one usually being more dominant than the other. Jung defined introversion as as “attitude-type characterized by orientation in life that focuses on one’s inner psychic and emotional activity.” Extroversion, he concluded, is an attitude type characterized by a concentration or interested on external subjects or objects, on the outside world.
Reading Jung, I see his ideas have been mangled and exploited nearly beyond recognition. He would surely be horrified at how his descriptions of people have been translated and butchered.
He states clearly and frequently that we are not one thing or the other, we are both. All of us sometimes need to draw our energy from the external world, to be healthy we must also draw meaning and energy from within, from ourselves. It makes perfect sense to me, so obvious it hardly needs to be a theory.
In the popular culture, an introvert is described as someone who prefers solitary activities to interacting with large groups of people. If you would rather work through your feelings in your diary than have a conversation, then you are an introvert, according to vocabulary.com. Most people believe that an extrovert is a person who is friendly and outgoing, and who draws energy from being with other people. An introvert is believed to draw energy from being alone. This feels like a quiz, not a revelation.
These definitions are not even close to Jung’s idea.
I always draw energy from other people, one of my favorite things in the world is to meet other people and talk to them. It is a kind of oxygen for me. I also cherish solitude, I am most often alone, I have worked alone for years, I can be gregarious and overbearing in the right circumstances, and shy and withdrawn in others. It depends. I love good talk, I hate small talk.
I draw great strength from meditation, walking my dogs, talking to my wife, reading and brooding in my study. It’s like my wonderful analyst said back in New York City, when corporations paid for such health care.
I am Jon.
Like everyone else I know, I don’t have to be one thing, I can be one thing and the other. We are a complex species, we have many parts to us. There is no reason for me to label myself in such a small way. I am more than one or two things, I am a thousand things. I don’t have to submit to the labels of other people, many are looking for mirror images of themselves, and if they label me, they are lazy and don’t really want to know me.
Isn’t this the miracle of individuality and identity, what it means to be human, to be alive? They can take every single thing we own but our identity. Yet we give it away for free all the time.
