From childhood, we’re conditioned to behave in ways that make others feel comfortable. Say please and thank you. Keep negative opinions to yourself. Don’t interrupt! According to Vishal Shende in his short ebook, Introvert: Being One Was Never a Crime, introverts might need to dump some of the norms in society’s collection of “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” that involve conforming ourselves to extrovert expectations. He writes:
“You don’t have to become anyone else.
Not a more social version of yourself. Not a louder one, or a more visible one, or one that performs enthusiasm for rooms you find exhausting and calls the performance growth. Not the version that other people have been designing in their heads since they first decided your quietness was a problem requiring their input. Not that version. Not any version that starts from the assumption that who are currently are is the draft and someone else gets to write the final copy.
You are already the final copy. The editing that was being suggested was never for your benefit.”
Shende invites us to think about the difference between a change that unmistakably improves our own lives and a change that mainly makes other people more comfortable. For example, if you’d rather not answer unexpected telephone calls, must you cater to other people’s convenience? If friends wish you’d loosen up and socialize more often, would that enrich your life or just fit better with their preferences? If you tend to save heartfelt thoughts for intimate friends and your partner, would becoming more communicative in more situations serve you or serve others?
Generally speaking, should you spend your energy becoming more like the “you” that other people regard as the norm or more like yourself? Again, here is Shende:
“Performing is, in a certain way, easier than being. You know what the performance asks for and you produce it and the room gives you its approval and the transaction is complete. Being – actually being, fully and without apology, the specific person you are with your specific history and your specific preferences and your specific walk – is harder, and quieter, and produces a kind of satisfaction that the performance never could, because it is genuinely yours rather than theirs returned to you.”
Let them try to make you conform, he says, and then just go your own way. You don’t owe anyone a song and dance about your decision. They may very well misinterpret your behavior. So what? Think of the energy saved by not trying to defend how you are or convince others that what makes you tingle with excitement or sigh with contentment deserves their approval. You’ll experience less stress, greater creativity and much more self-respect.
The quintessential refusal here appears in the 1853 story “Bartleby the Scrivener” by Herman Melville. Bartleby is a clerk in a Wall Street law firm who does careful work until one day he begins saying “I would prefer not to” whenever he’s asked to do some job task. For months, he says nothing more than that phrase, no matter how others in the firm try to reason with him.
You needn’t go that far. After all, Bartleby becomes homeless and eventually dies in prison of preferring not to eat.
You may find more practical guidance in the philosophical thoughts of Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor (121-180 CE) still revered for his clear-eyed reflections about mortality and self-mastery. Marcus Aurelius pointed out that when we try to mold ourselves according to the opinions of others, we are posing for heaps of sand that will soon be covered over by more and more sand. The people whose praise or criticism we shape ourselves for are, moreover, unknown to us – strangers we may meet only for moments, or never, he says.
“So much more respect have we to what our neighbors shall think of us than to what we shall think of ourselves,” Marcus Aurelius marveled. We need not hand over our power and autonomy to others, he argued. Keep in mind too, he urged, that only our own thoughts are within our control. Living according to what the nameless hordes think and feel about us is an unnecessary and unwise surrender, he maintained.
You may decide that the hassle of other people’s silent or voiced disapproval isn’t worth following that advice. But give the no-apologies, no-explanations idea a thought, all the same.
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