“At some point you just pull off the Band-Aid, and it hurts, but then it's over and you're relieved.” - John Green
Looking back on two of the most challenging days I’ve had this year, they had one thing in common: back-to-back meetings on the heels of late nights at work. At the end of days like this, I become a person who can only speak in short sentences and needs to burrow under the covers for the evening. Combine tired with long stints of extroversion, and I turn into a shadow self. This is hard for me to admit, especially knowing so many friends (and my husband) whose everyday lives involve back-to-back meetings. The refrain in my head says weak, and I’m coming to see this as the core issue: treating my introversion as something to be overpowered rather than respected.
Sometimes work or life demands back-to-back commitments, and introversion needs to take a back seat. But here’s the truth: I scheduled almost all these meetings myself. I need big chunks of time to write and edit legal briefs (the core part of my job) and to work on my novel, so I tend to think that consolidating meetings is efficient.
We often think about getting the hard things over with quickly. Rip off the band-aid. But this mindset doesn’t appreciate the need to refill, recuperate, and recover. Underneath my punishing self-scheduling some days is a belief that things that are easy for other people should be easy for me. If they aren’t, I have to hide it. How many back-to-back social or work outings have I muscled my way through with this mindset?
I was reminded of a different approach this week when my daughter Noa started preschool. I’d gone into her first day with nervous, rip off the band-aid energy. She’s almost certainly an introvert, an observer, finding her footing before jumping in. So I anticipated that her first days would but hard. But I thought we would struggle through, and then at some point it would get easier.
Noa’s lovely teacher had a different idea. She suggested that one of us come with Noa the first morning and stay as long as we’d like. Then on the first day, she suggested something even more incredible—that a caregiver could stay there with Noa for as many days as we’d like. She intuitively understood the importance of giving Noa her warm-up time. As a result, our girl has gone from two nights of heavily interrupted sleep before the start of school to sleeping like a baby after the first day. And next week, we’ll try a little more time without a caregiver each day.
“Getting it over with” is rarely the answer for introverts. When we have a choice, why not be our own kind teacher, allowing room for the gradual and the pauses that let our joy seep through?
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For more from someone who has truly claimed her introversion and joy in a quiet life, I really enjoyed
’s interview of this week:
I feel this deeply!!! I have a draft post about this, actually, where I asked myself what was “wrong” with me when I couldn’t handle a kid roller coaster in Cali and watched my friend come straight from a work trip to a friend trip. No way I could have handled a “back to back” like that. But she is her and I am me, and what we perceive as weak is actually a very unique superpower. If it weren’t for us slow-movers who are easily overwhelmed and need lotssss of space to process, we wouldn’t be the observers and writers that we are.
Thank you for pushing through to share these, even when your eyes are burning. Your voice — even when it’s tired — it matters. So much.