Chapter 4: Stranger Danger

As a child of the 80s and 90s, I grew up with the concept of “stranger danger.”  Essentially this campaign meant to teach young children that strangers are a threat to be avoided because strangers might try to kidnap you, which obviously would be terrible. You weren’t supposed to talk to strangers or look at them or interact with them in any way because they might want to kill you. Well, I can honestly say that I never learned this lesson. In fact, somehow I learned the opposite.  I love strangers. Love them.  I love to say hello to almost anyone who will talk to me.  I want people to know me, and I want to know them.  I love people.  I find people fascinating and can’t help but want to know my grocery store clerk’s life story.  A few key moments in my life illustrate my desire to befriend the world.  When my brother was getting married, we had coffee at the local Starbucks on the morning of his wedding. He was moderately embarrassed when the entire staff greeted him with congratulations and well wishes, as I had already reported on his impending nuptials.  When my sister-in-law was recovering from the c-section that brought my beautiful nephew, she headed to the bathroom at one point, leaving me with her nurse in the room.  By the time she finished, I knew that the nurse was engaged and had a pretty basic understanding of her wedding plans.  The local cafe I go to knows that I order brussels sprouts as a side dish with my meal (and often gives me free cookies).  I once counseled a young woman on an airplane who was moving to stay with her dad because the state had taken her out of her mom’s home.  I chat with waiters, cab drivers, baristas, and people standing in lines with me.  I can’t help it.  People fuel me.

When we talk about people like me, we use the term extrovert.  Really being an extrovert is less about how outgoing a person is and more about how they get their energy and how they process their thoughts and emotions.  I am an extrovert because I am energized by people, and I process things in my life by talking them out.  An introvert (aka the opposite of me) tends to gain energy from being alone and processes ideas and thoughts inwardly and then presents them to the world.  Much discussion in our culture centers on introverts and extroverts and how they communicate with one another.  A lot of what I’ve seen lately suggests that it is very difficult to be an introvert in our American culture.  This is arguably a fair point.  Most of the time, because extroverts tend to be loud and outgoing, they tend to steamroll the introverts. Introverts can be overlooked because they tend to be quieter and because it takes them longer to process. While an introvert thinks, an extrovert has eagerly offered thirty different ideas, any of which might be insane, but still they are putting it out there.

Many people I know, most of my friends in fact, could tell you about the plight of the introvert.  I can only speak to my own experience of being a loud, passionate, emotional, outgoing extrovert.  And I’ll tell you a secret that truly very few people really know and understand about me.  For most of my life (and sometimes still), I hated being extroverted. I hated that I was loud and outgoing and emotional. I used to pray I could be quieter, more serious, less passionate about every little detail.  No one in my family is like me. My dad purports to be an extrovert but he’s not in the same ballpark as I am.  My mom and brother are not only introverts but they are thinkers more than feelers. So you can imagine a typical dinner at my house growing up where my parents present bad news or something serious.  My mom, dad, and brother would sit quietly and ponder as I raged on, cried, or asked a zillion questions. I felt left out a lot as a kid in my family, which was no one’s fault. It was just a case of “one of these things is not like the other.”  And despite the fact that nearly every person in my life tells me that they’d love to be more outgoing and be able to stand up in front of people or be bold and loud and voice their thoughts, I can tell you honestly, it’s really hard to be so outgoing.  I imagine that those who are quiet and shy sometimes wish they could speak up. I often wish that my emotions were not evident all over my face or that I didn’t need to process how I feel outwardly to be healthy.  But I do.  I have tried to be something I am not, and anyone who ever attempts that knows it never works. My constitution is one that requires me to openly express (albeit in appropriate ways) who I am and what I think and feel.  I would love to be less “me” sometimes but the truth is, it just doesn’t work.

Lately I’ve realized why it’s so hard sometimes to be so outgoing and extroverted and emotional.  My vulnerability is always on display for everyone.  When I’m in a frustrating meeting, I can’t hide my irritation. When someone hurts me, I can’t hide my pain.  When I’m filled with joy, everyone around me knows.  And this is not to say I can’t control my emotions, but rather to acknowledge that for me to be truly Meghan, I have to express these feelings outwardly.  It’s very vulnerable, because to live this way means that those I encounter (including all those strangers I love) get a sense of who I am immediately. I’d like to be more mysterious sometimes and make people guess, but then, I would not be me. What is a constant struggle for me each and every day is how to be myself without apology. And I must say, some days are better than others. Some days I’d literally give you money to be a quieter, more closed-off version of me.  Other days, it’s not so bad being a loudmouth.  I guess that’s part of embracing who we are, which I’m starting to see is an ongoing life process.  I wish I could say that now I love my extroverted self, but the truth is, some days I’m just tolerating me.  And maybe that’s why I love people so much too. It makes me feel less alone to think there are others out there, on the same path as me, just trying to figure it all out.  None of us probably love who we are all the time, but maybe it’s okay to just try to love little pieces of ourselves as we grow older.  Maybe then, we can see the whole and recognize it’s pretty great.