Day 540: The Flip Side of Facebook

"Don't you just LOVE meeting new people?
Discussing ideas ... swapping life stories ... learning what makes them tick.
I find it SO invigorating."

Actually, no.
I have never, in living memory, felt the faintest hint of desire to meet a "new person".

When someone invites me to a party.

In fact, my fear scale looks a lot like this:

1. Heights (I sobbed my way through the black course at TreeGO)
2. Meeting new people / having to make small talk with someone I don't know well
...
...
...
...
3. Death
4. Seaweed that touches my legs while I'm swimming
5. Zombies, sharks, insects that might crawl into my ears at night, James Cameron's movie Sanctum, and everything else I can't think of at this exact moment

This is not to say that once I have met the "new person" and gotten to know them a little better, that I don't enjoy spending time together and building a friendship based on mutual interests and respect.

But meeting people is hard.
Especially the cheerful ones.

I tend to repel a cheerful person's advances in the same way a wary child might react when approached by a frightening stranger:

"Who are you, what do you want, and why are you smiling at me?"

The silent, unsmiling ones are okay, though.
In fact, the weekend I met my husband, I don't recall him smiling once the entire time.
I was hooked from that first blank stare.

He does smile quite often now, if you're wondering.

I think this also explains why I like animals so much.

Two things seem to heighten this unfortunate social paranoia.
1. Crowds
2. Pregnancy (hormones ... who knew that they would revert your mental state back to being an emotional teenager?)

This past weekend, I had the brilliant idea of accompanying my lovely mother to a ladies' retreat on PEI. We arrived at the dining hall late on the first evening, and waited for the speaker upstairs to finish her talk before digging into the snacks.

I can't imagine anything more terrifying than sitting at that table, waiting for several dozen good, kind, and cheerful Christian women to come traipsing down the stairs in search of cookies, fresh-cut vegetables, and cheese dip.

I fled five minutes later.

In fact, I fled quite a few times that weekend, once in tears, and spent most of my time in my bunk with my book choice for the weekend, ironically titled, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain.

While it didn't help much with the social anxiety, it did help me appreciate the benefits of being able to crave and enjoy time alone.

Creativity, a character trait that I would scarcely know who I was without it, is one of them.

In a roundabout reference to the famous scientist Sir Isaac Newton, Cain explains that, "...if you're in the backyard sitting under a tree while everyone else is clinking glasses on the patio, you're more likely to have an apple fall on your head."

So while this aspect of my personality certainly makes it more difficult to enjoy socializing, I also value the quiet enrichment it has also brought to my life.

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The weekend retreat also made me realize how much I depend on Facebook and other technologies like email, texts, and even blogging for initial social contact.

Growing up, I often felt that people were unnerved by my silent, reserved persona. While I wrote pages upon pages of thoughts and ideas in private, I remained unable to string together more than a few sentences in a public forum unless it was for a formal speech or presentation -- ironically, I have no fear of public speaking.

I also found it difficult to shake this image since most encounters with "new people" were in large groups, and I find conversing one-on-one to be infinitely easier and more enjoyable.

Consequently, I learned to carry a book-shield most new places I went and gradually lost interest in forging more than one or two new relationships a year because the amount of effort required was astronomical and it often required me to misrepresent myself as an extrovert -- and therefore lose part of myself -- in the process.

And then Facebook.

There have been a lot of honest and hard-hitting video shorts made recently about the pitfalls of social media.

Parents neglecting their spouses and kids while repeatedly scrolling for updates on a tiny mobile screen.
Young girls feeling a negative self-image because of their friends' unrealistic selfies.
Jealousy and envy and manipulating statuses to get more "likes".
Stretching the truth -- and even outright lies.

All are very real dangers.

But I can't count the number of friendships that have begun or deepened in real life because one or the other of us have added each other on Facebook.

A profile is like a window into a life.
Sure -- most of us make sure that only our clean laundry is visible.
And the glass might be a little rosier-tinted than life really looks like from the inside.

But unless you are one of the silent readers who never posts...

Show me your profile and I'll show you what you value,
...how you spend your time (or at least some of it)
...who is important in your life
...what we have in common.

Then, when I see you on the street, when we have coffee together or go for a walk ... I'll have a lot easier time keeping up a conversation. A conversation that, over time, may even deepen into a real friendship.

And hopefully, the next time you see me ... the strange, silent person hovering uncertainly on the edge of the crowd ... please don't assume that I don't respond enthusiastically to your cheerful greeting because I'm unfriendly or because I don't like you.

Because if you've read this far, you already know otherwise.

According to Susan Cain, one out of every two or three people you will meet today on this continent is an introvert. Others are extroverts, and some are in-between.

Whichever group you self-identify with, know this:
We are not alone.

And so I will continue to cherish my beautiful moments of silence.
But I will keep reaching out to this noisy, sometimes-frightening world in every way I know how.

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"Whoever you are, bear in mind that appearance is not reality. Some people act like extroverts, but the effort costs them in energy, authenticity, and even physical health. Others seem aloof or self-contained, but their inner landscapes are rich and full of drama. So the next time you see a person with a composed face or a soft voice, remember that inside her mind she might be solving an equation, composing a sonnet, designing a hat. She might, that is, be deploying the powers of quiet."

-- Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking