I was a Closet introvert. These were the Repercussions.

Sometimes you have a narcissistic personality. Sometimes you want to be the highest in the room. But unbeknownst to you, something inside you dies, rotting slowly until you find yourself, alone and empty. This is a mistake that I committed for years until 2020. I changed my ways and started experiencing new things. And I have found a new kind of happiness, the happiness I never felt before.

A Closet Introvert

The idea of being an introvert seemed repulsive to me. Why should I be the quiet kid that everyone makes fun of? Even though I spent hours alone, talking to myself, thinking about things, I never let the world know that I was an introvert. And whenever I was in the outside world, trying to put a false facade, I buried this idea of being an introvert in some dark and unvisited room of my mind.

But you cannot delete something from your mind, can you? Have you ever had the experience when someone reminded you of something and then suddenly you remember it vividly? Where was this memory all this time? It was inside this unvisited room, where I had put my reality of being an introvert. And my brain had ways to take that out, whether I liked it or not.

I could hide it but never run away from it.

After pretending to be an extrovert, soon I forgot that who I was in reality, like an actor getting too deep into the role. But I was still an actor. My introverted personality manifested itself into something else. It was the feeling of being superior. I didn't have many friends. From grade 6, I had only 1 friend. Why? Because I thought the others were not worthy of my friendship.

This false superiority resulted in me distancing myself from any group of people. At the surface, my subconsciousness kept sugarcoating my acts with words like "you're superior, you don't have to get to their level." Or "they need to come to you, why should you go to them?" And when they did come to me, all I got was a dopamine shot of feeling appreciated but I lacked the desire to reciprocate the same feeling.

Oh, the Folly

This feeling of superiority served me well until people stopped caring about me. Soon when almost everyone I saw was in a group of four to six people, I would sit alone in the canteen, trying desperately to convince my mind that they don't deserve me.

I would rather die of being alone than to go and be with them. A hatred developed inside me out of nowhere. This subconscious mind can be very dangerous. One day, I realized that I had no real friends, no real connection, no one to share my feelings with. I had no one who can be there for me. Was it because people hated me? No. It was because I hated them, unknowingly. I had become this narcissistic desolate person who was still denying the wrongs in him and looking for the wrongs in everyone else.

Accepting Reality.

When things got to a point when I started feeling depressed, I knew I had to change. All I had to do was to accept who I was. I had to take this bitter, hard to swallow Red pill and acknowledge who I was, to myself.

This wasn't an easy or quick process. The old habits started to kick in whenever I tried to change myself. I went out with a girl on a date and I remember thinking, "Oh I am never coming back to date this dumb girl." Two days after that, I remember I was writing something and I needed to find the source of statistical data. I told her (we were chatting) and she spent an hour to find that for me. That "dumb" girl had just turned into the sweetest person I had ever known (we never came into a relationship but I still talk to her). This was a wake-up call not to lose myself again.

I started talking to the uncool people, to the idiots, to the dumb people (they weren't idiots or dumb or uncool, it was an adjective my narcissistic self had appointed to them. And all these years, I was the uncool dumb person).

It was difficult for me at first, but soon I started to respect people, irrespective of their personality, knowledge, or anything other than their behavior with me. Soon I felt comfortable with making new friends. I started being in different groups, enjoying conversations.

Coming in terms

I soon realized that I really was an introvert all these years, wasting my teenage years running away from it. I missed many opportunities for making great friends, connections, and stories. But not anymore. I am still a bit of an introvert. I enjoy the company of one or two friends and I prefer staying in the house, along with my thoughts. And there is nothing wrong with that.

Never push away what you feel like you are. These ideas never leave, but they come out in a more dangerous and damaging way. I started expressing more to my friends (all of them) and found that it was easier to connect this way. This made me trust them and I started feeling vented.

You have to make new connections, real relations with other humans, irrespective of who they are. Make a good connection with anyone you come in contact with, even if it is for mere minutes. It gives your mind a different kind of happiness. Because in the end, it is all about receiving happiness and not about the effort of seeking it.