As a reader and a writer this quote makes so much sense to me, but as an introvert, I silently savor and have internal arguments with those around me in which I shout this quote in its entirety and the subject recoils as if just slapped in the face … ahhh.
I am notorious for declining invitations to dinner parties, girls’ nights out, and anything with “gathering” in it’s name, not because I loathe the people around me or even because they agitate me, simply because I do not require much social interaction, the way some people have a small threshold for sugar and have lost appetite after one single cookie (boy, how I’d love to trade with those people). Being a lover of sugar, I immediately feel pity for that poor man who just cannot seem to enjoy sugar the way that I do because I would gladly gobble that whole plate of cookies. In reality, these people only need a taste of sugar to be fulfilled. That one cookie will be enough for them for days and another cookie would be too much. Our thresholds for sugar just do not meet up, just like my need for social interaction is not set at the same pace as those around me.
Unfortunately, the ones that I love, when I love being around people, do not understand. They often berate me with invitations “you can’t refuse,” giving titles like “shut-in,” and any ailment I could carry they will suggest “you just need people to talk to.” This is the time and place when I would love to pull this quote out of my ass and slap it on the table with an “in your face,” because while I haven’t been following my friend’s life, which usually hasn’t changed from week to week, I have been following the lives of many characters, I have experienced upheavals in lives and tragedies in deaths that they know nothing about.
Apr22
Renee Benson 