Now that you're an adult, you might still feel a pang of guilt when you decline a dinner invitation in favor of a good book. Or maybe you like to eat alone in restaurants and could do without the pitying looks from fellow diners. Or you're told that you're "in your head too much", a phrase that's often deployed against the quiet and cerebral. Or maybe there's another word for such people: thinkers.
Susan CainThere are only a few people out there who can completely overcome their fears, and they all live in Tibet.
Susan CainThe same person who would never raise his hand in a lecture hall of two hundred people might blog to two thousand, or two million, without thinking twice. The same person who finds it difficult to introduce himself to strangers might establish a presence online and then extend these relationships into the real world.
Susan CainINTROVERTS are especially vulnerable to challenges like marital tension, a parentโs death, or abuse. Theyโre more likely than their peers to react to these events with depression, anxiety, and shyness. Indeed, about a quarter of Kaganโs high-reactive kids suffer from some degree of the condition known as โsocial anxiety disorder,โ a chronic and disabling form of shyness.
Susan CainIntroversion - along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness - is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology.
Susan CainI get a lot of letters from introverts asking how they can meet people. The key is to make sure that you are doing things you enjoy.
Susan Cainyou once said to would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing one self to excess; that utmost of self-revelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind...That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough.
Susan Cain