There are many posts over the years that I have wanted to make but haven’t made. Some of them I’ve created as drafts again and again, but never published. Some of them I’ve published and then pulled back. I’ll be honest and say that most of this hiding out despite wanting to say something publicly was because I was afraid of upsetting significant others, family, friends, and so on.

But ’tis the season for me to lay it all on the line and let people know who they’re dealing with. If I end up alone and have to start life over, so be it.

So let’s see how many of these “I’ve protected other peoples’ feelings for long enough and now its time for me to reveal myself” posts I can knock out in one day, shall we?

— § —

I am an introvert.

I am not shy. (Ask my wife, or any of my friends, or any of my former students for that matter.)

And it is not a disease. Or a weakness. Or something that needs to be remedied.

In fact, I get terribly offended when people imply that there’s something wrong with the way that I am. There f**king isn’t. If you can’t be comfortable with the idea of introverts, it’s more likely that there’s something wrong with the way you are. I’ve long suspected that extroverts who spend their time trying arduously to get introverts to make a dozen new friends are actually projecting their own deep fears and unfulfillable need for validation onto said introverts. They are vaguely terrified to see that someone is often alone, or doesn’t have too many friends, and that is okay with it. It triggers something for them. Just my guess.

— § —

It’s not hard for me to make friends. I just don’t make a lot of them. And here’s why. There have been times in my life—times when I was feeling lonely, or when things were trending downward, or when I was just bored—when I took someone’s advice to “put myself out there” and “make friends” and so on, and I did. It’s not impossible. The steps are pretty easy. I speak English. And I’m a nice guy.

So what did I end up with? A lot of people that I genuinely cared about that wanted to see me all the time. And then I’d have to say no. Because it was exhausting and annoying. And then I felt terrible. Because I really did care about them and I really did feel as though they were my friends. I just plain didn’t want to see them most of the time. I wanted to do my stuff. Read my books. Work on my projects. Hell, just sit and reflect. Go for a hike. I preferred to do my plain old introverty stuff, and not in a group. And as a result, I hurt people. And I had to suffer through the awkward conversations and the pain that comes along with making people feel as though you’re rejecting them all the time.

And after each of the periods in my life during which I’ve gone on such a friend-making binge, usually for conscious put-it-all-out-there reasons, naively thinking I was “doing the healthy thing” (largely on advice of extroverts) and feeling tremendously exhausted by the process, I’ve ended up letting all of those friendships taper off and away. And that’s painful, too. But not as painful as having to deal with all of them all the time and try to explain that I just don’t need to see my friends all that much, and in fact I prefer not to. Lots of times, I just like to know that they exist and that’s enough for me. In fact, it is often preferable.

But here’s the thing. People seem to think that this is some sort of disease. That the fact that I made a whole bunch of friends and then let those friendships slowly wither means that I need some kind of therapy for it. That the natural state of life is to have a massive social circle and to go out and talk every night and to prefer to work in groups and to ask for advice from a crop of heads and so on. That I need to be fixed.

I do not f**king need to be fixed. There is nothing wrong with being an introvert. It is a way to be. Just like being a lumberjack, or a Buddhist, or gendered male (or female). It is a way to be. A perfectly legitimate, functional, fine way to be. Many, many very successful and historically important people have been introverts. Introversion confers many distinct advantages, not least amongst them the ability to get things done—largely because introverts can just sit down and put in hours when they feel inspired, rather than using a significant portion of those hours to socialize instead. And when this happens, it feels good. For introverts, flow is nirvana.

Indeed, many, many very happy people are introverts. Only they are not happy all the time because nobody is f**king happy all the time, and the fact that they are not happy at any particular moment is not “due to their introversion” any more than the fact that extroverts are unhappy and liberally sharing their hurt with a hundred different people on any given day is “due to their extroversion.”

— § —

It is work for me to socialize. With my children. With my wife. With my self, even.

It is good work. Joyful work. The most valuable work in life. I could never live without it. I would be devastated without it, particularly in the case of my wife and kids.

But it is work. Even socializing on Facebook is work that I do because it is needed. That is what it means to be an introvert, nothing less, nothing more. It does not leave me feeling energized to have a conversation, even with my closest, closest friend or with a circle of family, and even if the conversation is fabulous and fulfilling. It leaves me more tired than when the conversation started. That does not mean that it catastrophically expends me to have interactions. A lot of people have over-read into the things they’ve consumed online about introversion and come to imagine that an introvert is somehow deeply damaged by social interaction of any kind. No. It’s just work. Fulfilling work, important work, work that at times I long to do (say, with my wife, whom I in fact want very much to see and interact with every day). But it is work. Again, nothing less, nothing more.

And so, as a result, I consciously limit the number of close friends and close relationships I have in my life. Because I can’t sustain too many of them and I don’t want to hurt people by just plain not having the energy for them. You can’t sustain relationships that you don’t nurture anyway, and I simply can’t nurture too many. That’s just the way it is.

This does mean that I rely on the friendships that I do keep more than an extrovert might rely on their friendships. When the chips are down, I don’t have fifty different people that I can call. I have a handful. Yes, I could go out and get fifty different people once again, just to have more people to talk to when the chips are down, but the thing is that I wouldn’t talk to them anyway. Instead, they’d be “checking in” on me and asking me how I’m doing and showing up at my door with snacks and all of that really, really nice stuff that would make me want to pull my hair out for the extra work if, in fact, the chips were down. When the chips are down, more than at other times, I need the space to just do my stuff. And contrary to what extroverts tend to say, you can’t just do your stuff as an introvert if you’re not alone. Because non-introverts that try to accompany you in stuff-doing sessions, well… They talk to you. They can’t help themselves. And that means you’re not getting to do your stuff. It’s like an itch that needs to be scratched. You get impatient. You stop being a good listener. You long to extract yourself from the situation and just be alone again so that you can… do your stuff.

So I’ve learned my lesson over the years. A handful of people. Keep them close when you do talk to them. Bare your soul. Let them bare theirs. Be economical and encourage everyone to lay it all on the line without beating around the bush. And the rest of the time, let them be them over there, and I’ll be me over here and we don’t have to spend half of every living day chatting about nothing in particular. Because introverts can’t do nothing in particular very well. Everything in an introvert’s life is, in fact, something in particular. The nothings-in-particular, they got discarded a long time ago—and it is extra work to have to recover them, much less to then have to talk about them as a matter of mere politeness.

— § —

I don’t think all of this is an issue for anyone in my life right now. But it has been in the past, with some people. And I’ve never blogged about it in just this way, head on. And I’ve just seen a meme that made me want to scratch this itch.

So I’ll just say, on behalf of all the introverts out there: if you can’t handle friendship with an introvert—being not one of a hundred, but one of six, or one of three—if it makes you feel worried or pressured that someone doesn’t have too, too many friends other than yourself or that they seem to want to immediately open their heart to you and expect you to expeditiously open your heart to them—then politely excuse yourself from being friends with the introvert in question and say that it all just plain weirds you out. They’ll be okay. They’ll be grateful. I promise.

Whatever you do, don’t make it your project to come at them from a “place of caring” and try to fill their lives with people and smalltalk all while maintaining your distance, just to make yourself feel better.

They will not thank you for it in the long run. And you also won’t feel better in the long run being friends with them, if that’s the way you feel.

— § —

Mini-manifesto over.

You know that you’re a “real” blogger not when you get paid to do it, not when you have a post go viral, not even when you’ve spent decades in your career doing it for companies of all kinds and sizes.

No, you know when you have finally given in and given up on any other aspirations in a realistic way when you make your fisrt post about sex.

So here it goes. It’s gonna be short.

— § —

I don’t know if it’s this way for other guys, but I am coming to learn that it is this way for me. Here comes the line that will create problems and disagreements and criticisms and so on. But:

In myself, at least, intimacy requires sex. It is the one and only key to bringing down the inner walls. Without it, as time passes, the walls, they go up. They just do.

I suspect that our therapist and an army of concerned people (let’s be honest, many of them women) might disagree. Tell me that it’s precisely the point in my case that I have to break through those walls with pure, unadulterated metacognition and trust.

I don’t buy it. I’ve been alive for a long time. I can only say what I deeply, deeply feel. Sex is the emotional ocean beneath the surface. The wellspring of deep feeling. The core of connection. For me, sex is exactly synonymous with trust, feeling, and commitment as a package. They cannot be separated. The presence of one is the presence of the other. The absence of one is the absence of the other.

It just is. Sex opens parts of my brain and parts of my heart that otherwise are closed. And their natural state is to be closed. They have to be opened anew each time, regularly, or they are quickly and simply inaccessible to me (much less to others).

— § —

This goes rather clearly with the love languages post I made earlier.

People don’t seem to believe that guys are ever wired this way. But I am. And there is no getting around it.

And if I am wired this way, there must be other men that are, too. Take it under advisement, any of you in the “all men are predators constantly and sleazily seeking meaningless sex” camp.

I couldn’t have meaningless sex if my life depended on it. And I couldn’t have a meaningful relationship that would survive very long without it.

I want to be reliable and rock solid.

But I also don’t want to be taken for granted. It’s one of my biggest things.

Problem is, these don’t really go together. If you are reliable enough, you will be taken for granted. That’s just human nature, and it’s a key part of why people like reliability anyway—so that they can, finally and after you have proven yourself, take you for granted.

How do I square this circle in my life? I either need to become more okay with less reliable or become okay with getting taken for granted.

The thing about kids is that if you let them get to you, you’re sunk. The only way not to go crazy is to stay emotionally above the fray. To remember that you’re the adult, you run the show, and at the end of the day they’re still gonna be there tomorrow, needing you just as much as they did today, so you can’t get caught up in drama, let yourself get worked, or let yourself get exhausted.

Say what you mean, do what you do, love them without caving to them, and let them figure out the rest. They’ll figure it out. They’re wired that way.

— § —

The thing about emotional needs is that while everyone has them, the fundamentals of fulfilling them have less to do with other people than they have to do with your own self.

If you know what you need, you’ll get your needs met.

If your needs aren’t being met, then you don’t actually know what you need. Maybe this is because you can’t face it, or maybe it’s because life is confusing. But if you go for extended periods of time in a “my needs are not being met” frame of mind, some introspection is probably in order.

— § —

Even so, and apropos of my last post, it’s not always easy to do the right thing, to do what is necessary or what you’re sure is the thing that you ought to do. But then, there is no reason it should be easy.

I’m not going to say that “nobody ever said it would be easy” because, in fact, that’s not true. Way too many people and pundits and zen-better-your-life-gurus and BFFs out in the world tend to say that it’s easy or to speak in platitudes that make it sound as though it is supposed to be easy.

But that’s bullshit. Life is hard. Get a helmet. Doing what needs to be done can break you. That’s just the way it is.

But growing up is when you realize that not doing what needs to be done will break you harder.

Life is a kind of least-of-all-evils (or, more optimistically, best-I-can-do) balancing act. There’s no way around that.

If life was ever easy, there would be someone on record amongst the smartest, wisest, or most successful people in history that had an easy life as evidence for this possibility. What you see in every biography, instead, is trouble and pain and suffering as far as the eye can see.

There is no known antidote, to date, for entropy. Nobody can hold it together because it can’t be held together.

But it’s just like raising kids. Either you can let it get to you, in which case it can and will overtake and overrun you, or you can appreciate what is, make your peace, do what needs to be done, and let the chips fall where they may.

— 6 —

Did I just paraphrase Bobby McFerrin in long prose?

“Don’t worry. Be happy.”

– Things can be right without their being easy
– Contradictory facts can in fact both be true
– Just because one day is bad doesn’t mean the next one will be
– That a decision is yours doesn’t mean it isn’t also someone else’s
– Making choices is not the same as controlling (or even knowing) outcomes
– Twenty-four hours is a much longer time than a single day
– Watching the time and taking the time are separate things
– Space cannot be eliminated; only filled—and not all of it
– Light and truth share the same quadratic falloff function
– You can want to share with someone without it being about them
– Little boys dream about forces and their environments
– Patience is another word for respiration
– Inside every child is an adult; inside every adult is a child
– The proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem says nothing about the Riemann Hypothesis
– Heat or light, it’s all radiation
– Hope for the Riemann Hypothesis lives because Fermat’s Last Theorem was proven
– Children and adults are not the same inside
– Respiration is the most critical property of patients
– Environments force little boys’ dreams
– You can want to be with someone even while you can’t share with them
– Quadratic falloff functions impart the evidentiary properties of light
– Not all forms of elimination create space
– Separating time from watches is a good way to take it
– Every day the world is reborn in twenty-four hours
– Controlling (and knowing) outcomes is a sound way to eliminate choices
– That a decision was someone else’s doesn’t mean it wasn’t also yours
– Believing that tomorrow will be bad makes today so
– Deep truths are the hidden forces that fabricate facts
– Things can be easy without their being right

All of these long and wordy entries lately, and yet in the end it’s really all the same nonsense that it always was before. Why? Why do I do this? What is the benefit? And yet I am positive that there must be one or I wouldn’t have kept it up all these years.

— § —

“Hell is other people.”

And yet, heaven is, too.

I think that has always been the crux of things. In an existence caught between heaven and hell, some of us just want to be “heard” in a way that implicates neither. That way is, in fact, to post on my blog.”

— § —

Laying in bed feeling exhausted but unable (unwilling?) to sleep.

All of these people that don’t blog or that say it’s an inappropriate thing to do… They are the people that lie to themselves so regularly that they no longer recognize the
lies as such.

— § —

Given my nickel allergy, I’ve long been in the habit of taking my wristwatch off every night before I go to sleep. And there it is now, on her nightstand.

Only tonight I feel the compelling impulse to put it back on and to wear it as I sleep. So I will.