Quiet People Like Me

I like to go off from the crowd, either alone or with one or two friends. Sometimes, even one or two are too many for me to be around. Sometimes, it is enough for me to be with my self. But, just because being with people tends to wear me out, doesn’t mean people don’t mean a lot to me. It is because people mean so much to me that they wear me out. A stranger beside me on a bus. I notice them. I feel uncomfortable. I don’t want to say the wrong thing or give him or her the idea that I don’t care about their existence. But, I don’t know how to sit, what to say. It wears me out. A gathering of seven or eight people. I don’t know how to deal with that many people at once unless I have a clear role. Give me a thousand people in an auditorium, make me the speaker, I am not nervous. Give me four people I don’t know and put me in a room with them with the expectation of social interaction, and I am as nervous as can be.

It is a real misunderstanding of shy people when others think they don’t care about people or don’t care to interact with people. It is often an oversensitivity to others that causes so much reticence to interact. It is because human interaction means so much that many quiet people don’t take the risk of conversing with others.