On Introverts

Posted on June 18, 2012 Updated on November 20, 2013

Growing up, I’ve always had people call me abnormal just because I enjoyed sitting alone instead of socializing with others. The problem always exacerbates in Kenya because the community is so tight-knit there’s a phrase they use, “if you sneeze everybody knows.”
I don’t know if it is because the houses are so close together that you can literally hear the neighbor wake their kids up in the morning (and sometimes you wish that was properly censored because its not the sort of thing you’d want other kids to hear). Or maybe it’s because of how your business is everybody’s business because that is how it’s been from one generation to another. Add the 1000+ people who get invited to the average wedding, and Hodi rounds and you get a society that lives around socializing and has no place for an introvert.
And trust me, I would know because I grew up being called “abnormal” and my relatives always spoke about sending me to a psychiatrist because I was not normal. ( I even heard the comment yesterday.)
When in reality I’m just an introvert. People here fail to see that because of their own point of view of what “normal” really is.
So I am currently reading a book called “Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that won’t stop talking.” In terms of writing, I’ve read better-written books. But I love some of its ideas because it makes me feel like I’m not the only one with this personality trait. I guess it has helped me accept that I really don’t need to change just to be accepted by our society especailly when I read that some of the world’s greatest leaders were introverts. Introversion can also be a blessing because helps creative people because it gives them the 10,000 hours that they need to practice something to become a true world-class expert at it. (I read about the 10,000 hour rule from
Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers book). Creative people who are extroverts get too distracted to actually excel at the same rate as introverts.
And in a study they even showed that introversion could be 40-50% inherited so I don’t really need to cast the blame on anyone for how I turned up to be because it could be in my genetic make-up since after all, even my father is an introvert.
So no, I’m not abnormal, I’m just an introvert.