The Noisy Monkey and the Introvert

I am an introvert. It is not an illness. It does not need to be cured. Extroverts draw their energy from people, introverts draw their energy from the absence of people. Nothing is wrong, I feel fine, stop asking. Better yet, since I’m on paper and fantasizing that an extrovert has a brain behind the cloud of noise that hangs over them, let me tell the extroverts off.

Dear Extrovert, your constant stream of meaningless, thought-free chatter makes me feel like I am sitting inside the monkey house at the zoo. Is it too much to ask that you have a point when you speak? I really do not want to hear your feeble, so-called, “thought processes” as you fill the room with useless and worthless brainspew. Do you extro-people think anything that you don’t say out loud?

I need to be alone. My extrovert is trying to “help me” get over my “funk”. She feels that sitting quietly in the room with me is the same as me being alone. It isn’t. I love her, but she is wrong yet again. I don’t bother telling her so anymore, it is a waste of both of our times. As an extrovert, she is capable of listening, but incapable of learning from it. My introvert ways are so alien to her that I must be wrong about what makes me feel better. I love her, but it is frustrating. What I truly want is to sit alone and do whatever it is I feel like doing. When I say alone, I mean, I don’t want a living creature within hundreds of miles of me. Being alone in a room is good, being alone in a building is better, and being alone on a desert island sounds like heaven. I need to be alone, but here she is all cuddly and loving and trying to help and, unfortunately, just making it worse. She gets mad when I want to be alone. She treats me as if I am ungrateful that she wants to be with me. She constantly mentions that I am different now than when we started dating. In truth, the difference is that I live with her now. I cannot leave, I cannot escape to my own place, I cannot truly recharge in the manner that I want for as long as I want. If I retreat to my basement office, she follows. If I lock the door, she pounds on it. She will then spend an hour sitting in front of me explaining to me how she understands that I need to be alone, but, if she truly understood, she would just walk away and leave me be for the hour. Damn extrovert!

She woke me up at 7am with a coffee and a back scratch and it is a damn fine way to start the day and I do not deserve it. She got up at 4am because everyone in her family does it. The phone in our house rings at 5:30am as various relatives, also extroverts, check in and say good morning. A night person, I sleep deeply through predawn happy hour with nary a hiccup. Anyway, at this moment, I’m upright, I’m coffeed, I’m scratched, and I am under siege! She immediately starts driving the fog of sleep from head with a rundown barrage of the events of the last 3 hours. Family updates, work updates, friend updates, life updates, and then a list of times and dates and places for various things today and next week and next month…but now, my inner crab is armoring up and starts screaming, “Holy crap! Is sleep the only place we can hide from her?” I start asking her questions about the nothing that is spraying out of her head. She doesn’t answer the question I ask, she never does, she, instead, answers the question she thinks I am trying to ask. Few things piss me off more than an extrovert trying to understand what an introvert is thinking. As an extrovert, she is used to asking questions without thinking first, extroverts do most things without thinking first. Introverts don’t. I’m not asking the first question that popped into my head when I finally voice a question. I am asking the question that resulted from a series of high-speed internal research questions and arguments with special consideration given to logic. I use what is called a thought process and, after I have accessed all the information stored inside my brain to mull the topic over, then I speak. So I ask a question and she answers a different question and we do this until she gets mad because I keep asking the same question over and over in a simpler and simpler form as if she is an idiot. She never actually answers the question I am asking, so use your own judgment as to what that makes her, but I suspect it does rhyme with Shidiot or Moopid. Once I begin to assail her intelligence, she angrily flees. I make a mental note about success of the tactic.

In order to “cheer me up”, my beloved has decided to take me to dinner. It is a lovely gesture, but it is the opposite of what I need. I just need a few hours alone. Maybe ten hours or so in a row. I just want to sit and barely exist and not hear my name. I want to wander around in my underpants, listen to some music, play a few video games, organize my thoughts, and just recover the energy I need to face the world. Draw into my shell until I am relaxed and happy. But, instead, we go out. Damn extrovert.

The restaurant trip was no trauma. The place was almost empty and the food was amazing. I still have an “alone time” bill to pay, but it won’t be tonight. She was nice to me, she thinks she has helped, so now I owe her even though she has provided nothing that I actually want or need.

Okay, today I am seriously in need on aloneness to the point where bad things happen. With the best of intentions in her heart, I will murder this extrovert bitch! Go away! The kids are at school and I have just returned to my office to start my day. She has decided to work from home today so she can “leave me alone”. Yep, she’s home to leave me alone. She could be at work, but she stayed home because I need to be alone and she needs to be there with me. When logic fails to influence her thinking, a beating or killing seems fully justified. Why should my actions make any sense if hers do not? The kids are at school and my honey is not currently underfoot, but it’s only a matter of time befo… And there it was, her gesture of goodwill, “Do you want to go to breakfast?” I need to be alone and I would like to get my day started. Breakfast means a two hour chunk of time carved out of my five and a half hour “kids-are-at-school” time. So I say no thank you. “No Thank You” must be crazy person code for “I hate you as a person and I wish you would get paralyzed by a freak hamburger and football mascot accident”. She is angry that I do not want to go to breakfast. She stayed home specifically to help me be alone, damn it, and I have now crapped all over her kind gesture. Sigh. Her anger doesn’t make her go away though, it doesn’t make her storm off, it doesn’t do anything but turn the volume up on her constant extroverted, content-free, yapping.

I kindly ask her to leave my office. She does not. I kindly request that she leave. She does not. I tell her to leave. She does not. Having exhausted my kindness, I grab her by the hair, spin her around, and physically throw her from my office. Despite her version of the story, she does not actually leave the ground and cartwheel down the hall, but I am none too gentle. I don’t care. I am an introvert, not a damn doormat. The yipping and yapping of the extrovert grinds at me until, like the Incredible Hulk, I MUST be alone and if that means killing you, too bad for you, you moron. All you have to do is go away and you are safe. Are you so stupid that self-preservation is beyond you? Invade my personal space and I will cripple you and leave you to die on the floor of the laundry room. This is not a new response from me. I will ask a person to leave my sanctum as kindly as I can when I have had enough, but I will only ask kindly a few times. Then I ask less politely. Then I tell you the consequences of remaining in my room. And then execute those consequences upon you. I’m almost six foot and 275 pounds, a former football player and a current weightlifter…when I tell you I will throw you from the room if I have to, you better believe I literally mean THROW. Or you could just simply walk away. I won’t chase you, I don’t want to fight you to make you go, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t or that I am not any good at it.

I love days when we are not talking to each other. The solitude and quiet is awesome. She went out with her friends for about four hours this evening. I think it was supposed to teach me a lesson or some other unthinking extrovert nonsense gesture. But I’ll take my alone time whenever I can. I loved her being gone and I secretly wish she hadn’t come home at all. Not to wish harm on her, just so I can soak up the alone.

She is still angry with me and not talking to me, so I score another few hours of peace and quiet. She has started texting me, which means she wants to talk. No way! I plan to respond tomorrow and to preserve tonight’s silent and glorious aloneitude!

She went to work, but left a note. By the hearts and flowers on it, I can see that she wants to be friends. I wouldn’t mind another day or two (or a year) alone, but I’ll let her off the hook to preserve the relationship. I text her and a few hours later all is well. Another drama where no drama was needed, but an extrovert isn’t a thinking animal. I just needed to be alone. I asked to be alone. I demanded to be alone. All she had to do was leave me alone for a few hours, maybe even overnight. I won’t be out drinking and whoring and fighting. I just want to sit in my little basement office with the door closed and be alone, my own personal hidey-hole, my shell. That’s all I want. It doesn’t cost any money. I just need some time. I’m an introvert, not a criminal. Introverts become hermits because extroverts refuse to shut their mouths and leave them alone. A cabin off in the woods and no one around for miles sounds pretty damn good.

But we’re talking again…which means she is talking again…and talking and talking and talking and talking. Content-free and non-stop. My alonetime meter starts building up again and it won’t be long before I need to hide from the wordstorm yet again. It's a never-ending cycle. Can’t she just shut her mouth for a second? I am an introvert and, with every unimportant word, she gets closer and closer to becoming a quiet corpse at my feet. Since an extrovert cannot learn to shut-up, please go back to the start of this paper and begin again.