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Coming Out as an Introvert
“Are you nervous?”
“Terrified,” I replied.
We were sitting in the front row of the huge conference arena in Blackpool, UK. It was many years ago, and I was at the British National Union of Students conference. I was about to mount the podium and make a speech to an audience of several thousand delegates, most of who would be hostile.
“Just look at the front row, and imagine you are speaking to one of the delegates,” advised my student union colleague. “It always works for me.”
“No,” I explained. “It’s not the antagonism of the crowd that bothers me, I can handle that. It’s the after-debate party that terrifies me.”
And thus it was; my speech to the crowd went well, and much as I would have preferred to dart back to my hotel as soon as it was over, my duties as a student representative required mingling with other delegates. What we would now call networking. So, there I was, wine glass in hand, trembling at the thought of making small talk against the backdrop of clinking glasses and laughing revellers, who would become louder and drunker and the evening wore on. I knew that I would find conversation nearly impossible as I struggled to hear what was being said. My own long sentences would become progressively more difficult to express and the nuances of my voice would be trampled underfoot by the short staccato sentences of my adversaries (sorry, acquaintances), who would dominate the conversation with their shallow machine gun fire, shooting words as bullets in their ongoing onslaught of trivia. After all, I had been there before. Many an hour during my time as an undergraduate student had been spent at parties, looking for the kitchen, where the quiet enabled the conduct of real conversation, not the spurting of sound bites. The party became a euphemism for my life; even now, four decades on, at my job in a high-tech company, I seem to be looking for the kitchen, or any quiet space, where I can have a real conversation.
As it turned out, the after-conference reception went better than expected. I was accosted by many of the conference delegates, who wanted to respond to my comments to the plenum. Because I had a role, a subject upon which my views were solicited, I actually handled the evening very well. No longer required to make small talk, I was…
