Morgan Rinckey: Introverts are awesome

Any given Friday, I can be found on the couch at my dad’s house watching the TV with Hawthorne and Chester A. Arthur - my guinea pigs. I would prefer to be at home talking like a weirdo to my guinea pigs than be sitting in the middle of the Student Union where it’s loud and there are constantly new people walking in and out.

And you know who else probably felt that way? According to The Huffington Post, that would be Audrey Hepburn, Eleanor Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. And I am happy to be counted with them as an introvert.

Introverts are awesome. We are amazing friends because we are great listeners and form strong bonds with people. We are rational because we think before we speak and what we say is often very well thought-out.

And contrary to popular belief, introverts are not necessarily shy, reclusive people. Introverts are people who are comfortable in less stimulating social situations, because we don’t thrive on being social. Sometimes, introverts don’t find it necessary to communicate with others because we are comfortable with silence.

No one is completely introverted or extroverted (people who want to be the life of the party). People tend to be relative to each other on a continuous scale between introverted and extroverted. The people who are in the middle are ambiverts. But a third to a half of all people are introverts. And yet we are living in a world made for extroverts.

I know the extroverts probably believe the opposite; the world is made for introverts. The technology we have allows people to do individual activities. But think about how people get jobs now; it is not all about the previous work you have done, but also about networking.

Being a ‘team player’ is also a key phrase in job selection, but when introverts don’t contribute to conversations because they don’t feel they have anything more to add, they come off as an outlier rather than a team member. Introverts may do their best work on their own, but employers will have to settle for less when they enforce group work.

Children are growing up with the idea that they need to become extroverted. Elementary school classrooms are set up to allow group work, which isn’t a bad thing, but it doesn’t let an introverted person work best for who they are. Parents don’t make their children do individual activities; they make their children join teams and clubs to learn social skills.

Kids are taught to be extroverted because those who are not are outliers in elementary school. The kid who sits in the corner reading seems to be less outgoing than the class clown and children pick up on things like that.

When I have free time in class, I almost never talk to other students. Most of the time, I take out a book and read. To some this might make me look like a snob, but I’m really just more interested in books that I am in talking to other people. This is partially due to my shyness, but also because, as an introvert, I just don’t find it necessary to talk for the sake of talking.

Extroverts may be the loudest, but they are not the only kind of people in the world. To be accepted, we don’t need to become pseudo-extroverts.

There are people out there who are just like you, introverted or extroverted, and it’s you who has to find them. Or you could get some guinea pigs - it’s your choice.

Morgan Rinckey is a first-year double majoring in English and communication.