With each vacation that I take, one Torrie-truth is pounded over and over again into me:
I am the kind of person that needs a lot of personal downtime whenever I’m faced with a lot of novelty and excitement.
Some people can take in loads of new stimuli and seek out excitement and new people and new experiences and only be energized by it all.
Those people are extroverts.
Then you have the people who are more like me—we still crave new experiences and new people, but those novelties must be mixed with just the right amount of solo time, otherwise we get overwhelmed, stressed out, and even anxious.
We are the introverts of the world.
As a child, I naturally gravitated towards introverted things: art, music, reading, writing, people watching. But because I live in a culture where extroversion is celebrated, encouraged, and even forced, I got guilted into becoming a bit more of a social creature. In high school and after, I went so far as to become the kind of attention-seeking flirt I’d always made fun of when I was younger, and I pursued interests that thrust me into the limelight like musical theater, sports, and show choir.
These experiences created wonderful memories and forced me to grow–they helped me to develop my social skills enough that I could learn to reach outside of myself and make friends, even when faced with an unfamiliar situation, and they produced many of my fondest memories (like playing a ditzy teenager in Footloose).
But now that I’m married and long graduated from the social scene of high school, I’ve found myself slowly coming back into my natural self: I crave lots of quiet time by myself and with Matt, where we just lie awake in bed together and read, or where I just sit down and write in the silence of our apartment while the fan upstairs feeds me with the comfort of its whirring and the sunlight peeks through the ever-present gap in our cream curtains.
Many people (still) try to get to me to come out to more social events, but I’ve finally come to grips with the fact that I’m usually happier staying in my own quiet world, surrounded by books and good food.
Luckily for me, this trip to Missouri to see my dad has been the perfect blend of stimulation and silence–interspersed with all the newness of a big city is the quiet of a familiar home and familiar books and familiar people.
We head home tomorrow, but I can’t wait to share some of our experiences and pictures with you, but for now, I’ll just leave you with some of my favorite shots from our fishing excursion last Saturday (which aren’t Photoshopped at all—I swear!).
Here’s hoping your Tuesday is YOUR perfect blend of newness and comfort.
Are you an introvert that needs a lot of alone time to function well? Or do you tend to flourish best when faced with lots of excitement?
