I Love You, But You Need to Go: The Introvert’s Lament

I feel the need to say before I begin this post that I love college. I love that all my friends live in the same dorm, that whenever we want to see each other, the most we have to walk up is a flight of stairs. We grab lunch and dinner together. We often have the same classes.

I also hate that we all coexist so close to one another.

I understand how contradictory this can be. When I first see my friends, I am giggly and overly affectionate to the point of bemused annoyance. But progressively, I begin to become anxious and irritated with anything anyone says or does. This is completely my problem and not theirs, but that doesn’t stop me from seething with the thought, If one more person touches me, I’m going to scream.

Back home, my friends had learned a longtime ago that their little friend Emma needed to be left alone from time to time. They always invited me to hangout with them, but also understood if during that time I needed to go sit in the corner on my phone, that was a reflection upon me, not them. I got so used to this I forgot how to explain it to new people.

It doesn’t help that introverts and extroverts have always had trouble understanding each other, because we’ve only ever existed in our own heads. They can’t understand needing to be alone when there are all these great people around and I can’t understand liking any person enough to hang out with them for more than four hours straight.

Fully aware of this disconnect, trying to explain myself goes about like this:

Me: “I need to go.”

Friend: “Oh, do you have to do something?”

Me: “No, I need to-You see-I’m a-I need to not be around you.”

Friend: “What?”

Me: “I need to take a nap.”

Me: *Goes home and sits on Tumblr for the next three hours*

I’m aware that this is theoretically terrible. It’s terrible to not be excited to see your friend walk into to your room because they are interrupting your plans to watch Youtube all night. It’s terrible to get exhausted only watching a movie with your friends. It’s terrible that despite all this, I am terrified of being left out of anything. I’m aware that my friends are better than I will ever deserve. But I’m also aware that to maintain this beautiful relationship we have, from time to time, you’re going to need to go.