“Pastor Lindsay seemed quite shy and had difficulty engaging in conversation with others.”
There it is again.
This isn’t the first appearance of such observations. When I was going through candidacy [the process through which the ELCA approves pastors for ordination], I was required to take a psych eval and meet with a psychologist to go over the results.
I remember driving to this strange office building in Madison and sitting in a sterile room with this doctor. He drew a line on his white board. On the left side of the line, he wrote Introvert. On the right, he wrote Extrovert. Then he put an X where I had come out on the exam I had taken. It looked something like this –
_x________________________________________________
Introvert Extrovert
He told me engaging in the world as a pastor and such an extreme introvert would be difficult. In a candidacy meeting that followed, the committee told me I should “work on my introvert nature,” which I took to mean as change. Being an introvert wasn’t acceptable for a pastor. I had to talk more and be more extroverted is what I heard them telling me. Introvert became a dirty word.
The first line of this post comes from an evaluation I just received. It came from people whom I only met once; that was their first impression of me. Quite shy with difficulty engaging in conversation. You know, maybe I was. But that certainly wasn’t my goal. I tried so hard not to be.
And the truth of it is, I met with this group of people one night for a couple hours and I was exhausted for the rest of the week afterwards. Literally – the rest of the week. I spent so much energy to be – what I thought was – talkative and out-going for those couple hours. [Because that’s what an introvert does – becomes exhausted from being with people and doing their best to play an extrovert.] And still, my version of talkative and out-going was their shy and disengaged. *sigh*
I am an introvert and sure, I suppose that sometimes might come across as shy or disengaged. That’s not intentional Sitting in silence doesn’t bother me one tiny bit, neither does listening more than talking. Sure, I will avoid small talk when I can [Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, calls small talk a horror for many introverts. In certain situations, I could agree.]; if I see someone I know in the grocery store, I just might go down a different aisle to avoid a hello and how are you. [That’s sad but true. But, of course, I’ve never avoided you. Promise.]
Punch to the gut or not, I’m owning it. This is who I am. Hello, my name is Lindsay and I’m an introvert. Let’s have an in-depth one-on-one conversation and then have quiet time by ourselves.
there's no place like gnome. 