I’m kind of in a down period right now. Ok, it was obvious since Thailand, after all those exercises ended. That’s two weeks worth of depression and self imposed solitude, the former which I mind, the latter which I don’t.

I had peer appraisal earlier this week, for which I received comments that deemed me anti-social and self-centered. At first, I felt rather hurt; whatever happened to all those times when I sacrificed time and effort for the sake of others? But the more I pondered about it, the more I realised that it was simply a misunderstanding of the introverted nature which I fiercely propagated for the past two weeks. Some people are taking my need for solitude as a rejection of camaraderie. I have become the outcast in their eyes, to be scorned at their leisure.

More keenly than ever before, I now sense the extrovert-introvert divide, and the deep lack of understanding between. Maybe it’s more of the lack of understanding on the extrovert side of the divide. For them, energy and camaraderie and active lifestyles are signs of a normal person. For them, reading books and being alone all day is a sign of social paranoia. Maybe so, but in an environment where the same 120 people surround you all day and all night, how else can an introvert like me maintain his sanity? We have to reject camaraderie not because we want to, but because we have to: it leaves us exhausted and drained, and after sleep deprivation for nine days, it doesn’t really help my state of mind to be forcibly sociable.

I think the last straw was the end-of-frame dinner at the end of Crescendo, where we ate terrible food and watched terrible dancing and singing. Parties were springing up spontaneously and the few crazier ones were dancing on stage and it was all a little too much, too much. They went crazy, all crazy, jumping to the beat of Bon Jovi, and it just appeared to me to be a mass emotional orgy of crowd movement which drew everyone else like a high voltage magnet. I had remained unmoved, defying the crowd, and now am learning more about the social consequences of such defiance.

In time, the down period will end, and I will be active once more. That was how it always worked for me, an oscillation between solitude and activity that revolves around attaining equilibrium. However, people just don’t understand that. And when they asked me why, why do you seem depressed, how was I supposed to explain? That it’s because I’m an introvert? That sounded stupid. It still sounds shallow and woefully insufficient now. I can probably attempt to explain all day and they still will not get it. I simply shrugged my shoulders and avoid the bullet. Maybe I ought to bite it and spit it back one day, or the matter will never be resolved.

Or I can always bury it. On this tabula rasa I ink the trouble and shelf it in the dredges of time. I just feel like running far, far away, to a place where roads stretch endlessly across a grassy plain with mountains in the distance, and the sun shines softly and the wind blows gently.
01:06
0 Comments | Post/Read comment