Quiet Quiz: Are You an Introvert or an Extrovert?
Excerpted from: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain

To find out where you fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum, answer each question True or False, choosing the one that applies to you more often than not.

1. ______ I prefer one-on-one conversations to group activities.

2. ______ I often prefer to express myself in writing.

3. ______ I enjoy solitude.

4. ______ I seem to care about wealth, fame, and status less than my peers.

5. ______ I dislike small talk, but I enjoy talking in depth about topics that matter to me.

6. ______ People tell me that I’m a good listener.

7. ______ I’m not a big risk-taker.

8. ______ I enjoy work that allows me to “dive in” with few interruptions.

9. ______ I like to celebrate birthdays on a small scale, with only one or two close friends or family members.

10. ______ People describe me as “soft-spoken” or “mellow.”

11. ______ I prefer not to show or discuss my work with others until it’s finished.

12. ______ I dislike conflict.

13. ______ I do my best work on my own.

14. ______I tend to think before I speak.

15.______ I feel drained after being out and about, even if I’ve enjoyed myself.

16. ______I often let calls go through to voice mail.

17. ______If you had to choose, I’d prefer a weekend with absolutely nothing to do to one with too many things scheduled.

18. ______ I don’t enjoy multitasking.

19. ______ I can concentrate easily

20. ______ In classroom situations, I prefer lectures to seminars.

The more often you answered True, the more introverted you are. This is an informal quiz, not a scientifically validated personality test. The questions were formulated based on characteristics of introversion often accepted by contemporary researchers.

Flo, my dear friend who was eaten by Texas recently, sent me one of those “post ten things about yourself and ask your friends to do the same” messages. As I’m waiting for my laundry to dry - and also, because I’ve already blown through every episode of How I Met Your Mother streaming on Netflix - I figured there were worse ways to spend my time. 

1. I’m a vegetarian. I started when I was 20, after watching a few too many documentaries. Lately, I’ve been eating vegan - mostly raw, unprocessed food. Only I don’t often talk about it, because I don’t like the “why don’t you eat _____?” conversation. 

2. All my favorite jobs so far have been teaching jobs. Today my SAT student wrote in her essay, “So lots of different people can change the world, whether it’s Superman or a simple black guy.” She’s from Brazil, and she meant to say “…or a regular human with strong oratory skills,” as in Martin Luther King, Jr. 

3. When I fold my laundry, I often imagine people I’ve loved folding their laundry. 

4. Celebrities who share my birthday: Edgar Allen Poe and Stephanie from Full House.

5. I surprised myself this year - now, if I go a few days without doing yoga, I feel like I’m missing something. 

6. No New Year’s resolutions, just two things I’ll remind myself when I need to: love yourself/be kind to yourself, and live in the moment. 

7. I love that everyone, similar as we are, has a unique story to tell. I think, though, that the Internet encourages people to tell too many stories. This led to a break from facebook, which has been going strong for a few months. If anyone asks why I’m not on there, I feel like I’m being too open by saying, “Because I don’t want to compare myself to other people, and that’s exactly what facebook encourages me to do,” so I say, “I’m so much more productive without it.” That is a lie, because there’s still Netflix.

8. If an idea for an ending of something I’m writing comes to me before I reach the end, I almost never use that ending. It’s almost superstitious the way I’ll throw it out as a possibility. But maybe it’s logical - the first thing that comes to mind is the easiest, and least surprising.

9. This week, my dog peed on both my roommate’s beds. I laughed. Yesterday, he peed on my bed.

10. Last semester, one student insisted she was uninteresting, bad at everything, and had no hobbies or talents. “I watch TV,” she said. ”Okay,” I said. “Me too. What do you like about it?” She told me her parents were never home, and when they were home, it was worse than when they weren’t, so she preferred the company of television shows. “And I guess I taught my dad to read,” she said. “I’d bring home my schoolwork and do it with him.”

She was angry, mean to the other kids in the class, so panicked she’d hide away in her room (it was a week-long retreat). You could see how inward she faced: her head down toward her feet, her chest in. She wanted to coil but our bodies can’t coil. 

In the end we got a one-act play out of her. I have no idea what she thought of the experience, whether she knew how much I saw myself in her.

My friend Emily made a short film today. Our job was to look at our hands as though we were tripping.

My dad likes to talk about four things. Dogs, the Yankees, cars, and money—in order of their safety of mention. He and my mom run a dog rescue, which means in addition to the nine or so animals they own, there are five to ten foster dogs coming in and out at all times. Because of this, you can stay on that first topic for an exceptionally long time. Just don’t ask about Delilah’s hip surgery, or Maggie’s collapsed trachea, because then you spill over into topic number four, and that, of course, is the topic you work actively all evening to avoid. You might notice that the cost of Delilah’s new hip equals precisely the amount of debt you’ve accumulated with your dad, money which he expects back in full—and which reserves him the right to veto any trips you might take, and any bicycles you might consider buying. My mother has a notebook titled, “What Dani Owes.” It’s blue and filling up. What Dani Owes is my dad’s favorite subtopic of his favorite topic, Money. You ask about the Yankees. They lost. You ask about Shelby, Lucy, that new one, the pug/pekingese mix. Delilah. Anyone. Zubi.

“Zubi’s dead,” he says. 

“Of course,” I say. “What I meant was, how are you doing without her?”

“Not well,” he says. “How’s the car? You still running it on no oil?”

“I filled the oil.”

“That’s my car,” he says, as if I’ve forgotten.

“Would you like it back?”

“Keep talking like that and you can walk the 70 miles home,” he says.

If my mother’s not there to step in with, “Did you see that church on the corner? That giant, tacky cross? There should be a town ordinance against that thing,” then we’ll likely crawl along the trenches we built when I was two, or whenever it was I began to speak. I’ll wind up in the corner of whatever room we’re in. His pointer will punctuate every third word against my temple. If he lands on “worthless” I’ll risk what comes next to remind him I’m an investment, worth at least $15,000 by now, which’ll buy his dogs two gastric torsion corrections, six urinary tract reconstructions, and three cataract removals. He’s the Dog Whisperer. He’s never laid a hand on any of them.

* I can’t post this without adding: I love my dad to bits. This is written in the conditional for a reason - in my adult not-living-with-him years, we get along quite well. No more pointing and yelling. As long as we don’t talk about money.

You can follow me on twitter if you’re into breaking-news items such as this. 

“It’s Not Up to You” - Bjork.

Possibly my favorite song of hers. Every time I fall into a routine, and think I might be able to guess what I’ll be doing this time next year, I remember the lyric, “Unthinkable surprises are bound to happen.” (Technically, it’s “about to happen,” but I’ve always heard it the other way.)

…Cause the evening
I’ve always longed for
It could still happen

How do I master
the perfect day
Six glasses of water
Seven phonecalls

If you leave it alone
it might just happen
anyway

It’s not up to you
Oh, it never really was
 

…

If you wake up
and the day feels broken
just lean into the crack
and it will tremble
ever so nicely
Notice how it sparkles
down there

I can decide
What I give
But it’s not up to me
What I get given
Unthinkable surprises
about to happen
but what they are

It’s not up to you
Oh, it never really was… 

(Source: bjorkish)

This is Samuel L. Jackson III. My parents rescued him from a shelter then pawned him off on me, whereupon I and my roommates fell deeply in love. I’m not sure who’ll keep him at the end of the year, but I’m not thinking about that now. 

Phillip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread. If I know my audience, at least four of you will love this. 

This is a one-act play by David Ives, which is part of his semi-Absurd All in the Timing collection. Every play in the collection is hilarious and brilliant.

This remains one of the funniest scenes I’ve ever watched - from Me and You and Everyone We Know by Miranda July. I should warn you, if you don’t already know what this scene involves, there’s talk about poop. Sexual talk. 

It’s the middle of my third semester (out of four, to graduate), and I’m 90% sure that my thesis will be a screenplay. Since I started the program last year, I’ve taken (or am currently taking) non-fiction travel writing, humor writing, playwriting, screenwriting, poetry, short fiction, and a class called “Imagining What You Know,” which is essentially flash fiction/nonfiction. Humor writing included some writing for children, so all things considered, I’ve had the opportunity to take a class in nearly every genre. 

Now that I’ve picked a genre for my thesis - everyone moves at a different pace with thesis work; some students came into the program with something nearly ready, while others take four years to complete it - it’s becoming real, quickly: first, that this time next year I’ll be finished and onto the next phase, whichever that might be; and second, I have to buckle down and work hard at this.

I’m used to constant work, but not focused work. If you never see things through to the end, never put everything you have into one project, skill, interest, etc., then people will praise you for all the potential you have - and no involved parties will be disappointed. How wonderful! If only you could do that forever, didn’t experience a growing part of yourself screaming, “Do something already.”

This afternoon I wanted to tear, smack, bite, whack, kill something. Or, you know, just cry for an hour or two.

As a full-time student, I’m allowed nine free counseling sessions with an on-campus social worker. I haven’t been to therapy in six years. It might be the nine-session crunch that allows things to come out so quickly, but Jesus, these are the most fruitful sessions I’ve ever had.

I was reluctant to post about that on here, because of the whole stigma thing, but I’m a huge proponent of therapy and I realized I don’t have anything to hide in that department. (I still plan to become some sort of therapist, some day.) And, though I am not a teenager, sharing personal things on here sometimes helps me breathe better. 

For the first few sessions, I talked and talked, grasping at straws (want to know where that idiom comes from? Click here and here) to get to any possible source of the anxiety I started to feel this summer, the extremety of which I hadn’t experienced since I was 21. The summer conference at Southampton had a couple hundred people, which set off some panic attacks, which then set off depression, and then, well, I became paralyzed. But life happens around you, so I was also trying to start a relationship with one of my friends, which ended as soon as it began, which made me even more depressed. Then, as I was resigning myself to the idea that maybe I’m still not ready for a relationship, another one happened. And a couple of months later, ended. But even at the wonderful height of it, I was miserable, if that makes sense. The bursts of adrenaline/endorphins took me out of the fog for moments at a time, but there was something deep-down awful and shitty, and inexplicably so.

This isn’t new for me. But I also don’t believe in seeing oneself as a disease, so I wouldn’t go as far as to diagnose myself with a permanent condition. I do think, though, that this keeps coming back because once I feel fine I stop going to therapy and never quite pull the problem up from its roots.

So this week, after talking and talking, and not hitting any nerves, we got into a discussion about shame. The moment she pointed out that there are two levels to the issues I’m having - the primary: anxious/depressed feelings in themselves; and the secondary: shame about having them, and fear that people will think of you negatively for having them - I broke. For all my time studying psychology, talking to friends about it once college was over, and going to therapy, shame had never occurred to me. Yes, I’m afraid I’m going to be “off” while I’m at work, and so worry that my employers will see it, and think they can’t trust me, and dismiss me for being unreliable. I’m afraid potential significant others will see that I get this way, and run. I’m afraid new friends won’t think I’m fun to be around because every once in a while, I’m miserable.

This week my therapist asked me to write down all the things I tell myself throughout the course of a day. “Any negative self-talk,” she said. “Some of it might have been with you so long, it’s a whisper, or you don’t hear it at all. But tune in, and write it down.” Leaving her office I felt great, thinking, “Finally, this’ll all be on the surface, and then we can systematically attack and disprove all the shitty notions I have.” I like systematic things, and the promise of progress. Then I go home, read a screenplay, and finished up a poem I’d been working on. My thoughts while reading the screenplay for Little Miss Sunshine: “This is a brilliant fucking screenplay. You can’t do this. Why write one at all if you can’t write one like this?” Then I start editing a poem that’s due for class the next day. “This is horrible,” I think. “This isn’t going anywhere. There’s nothing new here. You could never publish this.” And yet I was working with subject matter that was, for the first time in a while, important to me, going back to the string of British men I encountered in Colombia who thought the way to bag a woman was with back-handed compliments, as in, if you bring her down, she might doubt her self-worth just enough to sleep with you.

I didn’t need those British half-compliments: I give my ego enough of a beating on my own. When I look in the mirror, oh, it’s a field day. So, that excited feeling I had after leaving her office that morning? It went to shit the moment I put what she said into practice. Turns out, I bring myself down nearly every minute of every day. Just like she asked, I turned up the volume on the whispers. That self-doubt about writing, that’s at full volume already. But the whispers are far worse. They’re nastier than high school bitches. “You’re fucked up,” they say. “No one’s going to want to be with someone as fucked up as you are.” “People want to be around happy people. Why would anyone want to be around you?” “You’re hopeless.” And, my favorite, “You’re not capable of a healthy relationship.” 

I’m aware of how nonsensical most of these thoughts are. And I’m aware that once I talk them through, I’ll be able to internalize how nonsensical they are. But with the volume up, it was almost unbearable to notice all of this. So instead of trying to bear it, I went to yoga. The first class I’ve been to in months. In the hour before I left for class, I was at a complete low. Didn’t feel like moving to walk the dog I’m pet-sitting for, didn’t have the energy to change out of my regular clothes and into yoga clothes.

After the class, I came back to the house I’m watching and felt almost normal - played with the dog, walked her around the yard, met the neighbors - who are so kind they told me don’t bother picking up what Lilly had just put down on their lawn - and sat down to write this. Which is extraordinarily personal, more so than I had intended, but I’m glad I did it, because really - sometimes I feel like I can’t bear being myself. And I’m on a journey to learn how to not only bear, but like myself, and I suspect there’s something in that worth sharing.

FYI, right before writing this (for an assignment) I listened to this beautiful song. 

I remember how she used to kneel down by the still birds after they’d passed. “Finally you get a good look at the feathers,” she’d say. Then she’d carry them to the corners of the yard, away from me and her mom, and the neighbor’s dog, Guiseppe. There’d be dirt to her elbows.

One Thanksgiving when her mom was squeamish, Rachel stepped up and threw her hand deep into the turkey. She scooped out the insides to make room for the stuffing, rinsed off her hands, then asked if she could run around with Guiseppe while there was still light. She was six and didn’t know what she was holding.

Late at night, once, I argued with her mother. Two ants walked together toward the ceiling and parted. Andrea said it was a sign. Next day I asked Rachel what she thought about the ants and she asked to be taken to the scene. We walked to the bedroom and I plotted their paths in pencil. “Here they were together,” I said, making a circle. “Then right at the crease, here, they went off.” I drew lines on the ceiling that forked.

“Ants look like aliens up close,” she said. She climbed onto the bed, looked up at the penciled map. “Was it very dark?”

“Light enough that we could see them,” I said. “But it was night.”

“And night is dark,” she said, instructively. “Do you know that ants have bad eyesight?”

“I did not.”

“Since they can’t see so good they have their antennae. Miss Roberts calls them feelers.” She put her finger to my shoulder. “If I were an ant and this were my feeler I could tell you a message just like that.”

She was bony like a bird. She decorated the house with pinecones and snake skins. That morning she had burrs in her hair and grass stuck to her knees.

“My theory,” she said, “is they got lost. Each thought the other was behind them. And then they weren’t.”

Rachel fixed a lot of things this way.

TYLER

We met once before, actually.

JAMES

Oh? Cool.

TYLER

Yeah. At that barn that was converted into a movie theater.

JAMES

Yeah? Shit. Don’t remember it.

TYLER

It’s next to the old movie theater that was converted into horse stables.

JAMES

Oh, I know the place. I just didn’t remember meeting you before. I live right behind there. Can’t open my windows, unless I want my place to smell like shit and popcorn.

TYLER

Poopcorn. Ha ha!

JAMES

Right.

TYLER

Uh, bum a cigarette, dude?

JAMES

I don’t smoke.

TYLER

But you’re holding a—

JAMES

Oh right, the box. It’s part of this art project I’m working on.

TYLER

Cool, man. So you’re an artist?

JAMES

(Looks down at his outfit, gestures with his hands.) Uh, yeah.

TYLER

Yeah, totally, man. I’m working on this thing myself, actually. I’ve been buying these cactuses—

JAMES

Cacti.

TYLER

And I’m totally gonna, like, do something…with them.

JAMES

Careful, dude. That shit’s dangerous.

TYLER

 I’ve got gloves. It’s cool.

JAMES

Nah, man. Like, cactus are old hat. Pretty much every great artist that’s ever lived in Brooklyn has done a cactus installation.

TYLER

I didn’t realize—

JAMES

I was at a show last week where this guy made these sick portraits by weaving thread around the spikes. Bette Midler, David Duchovny, you name it. Oh, and at this other show—man, it was so fucking brilliant, I can’t believe I didn’t think of this—a bunch of dudes had these signs around their necks, saying “touch me.” But they were covered in cactus spikes.

TYLER

The signs?

JAMES

No, the people.

TYLER

Right. You know what would be totally fresh, man?

JAMES

What?

TYLER

Getting a celebrity, Bette Midler maybe, to cover herself in spikes and wear that “touch me” sign. Like, a reaction piece.

JAMES

Michelle Williams would be better. Hot enough for people to brave cactus spikes to touch her. I could probably get her to do it.

TYLER

The blond girl from Dawson’s Creek? You know her?

JAMES

She’s practically my neighbor.

TYLER

So you guys are friends?

JAMES

Essentially, yeah.

TYLER

This is perfect.

JAMES

It really is. There could be all kinds of celebrities, and all kinds of deterrents. Like, one surrounded by a ring of fire. Cher, maybe.

TYLER

Yeah, like, “How far would you go to touch a celebrity?”

JAMES

What else is there besides cactus spikes and fire?

TYLER

Hmmm. This is like one of those times when you know there’s got to be something else, like, something obvious, but you just can’t think of it.

JAMES

You could put one at the bottom of a really cold pool. With scuba gear, obviously.

TYLER

That’s beautiful. Or, like, a pool of boiling water.

(a beat)

TYLER

Oh. Nevermind. I feel like it’d be really difficult to sustain a boil.

(a beat)

TYLER

So what’s the deal with the empty cigarette box?

JAMES

Okay. (Takes out box, gestures excitedly.) So it’s all about expectation, right? You see a cigarette box, and what do you expect to see inside?

TYLER

Cigarettes.

JAMES

Exactly. But, like, instead there’s nothing. I’ve got this vintage tin cookie container, too. What would you expect it to hold?

TYLER

Old cookies?

JAMES

Right, but instead it’s empty. I’ve got the show all planned out. Containers everywhere, and all these expectations, and then—

TYLER

You’re just gonna bum everyone out, dude. And after opening, like, four containers I think we’re gonna get the point. You need a reason to keep people looking.

JAMES

People are stupid. They’ll keep looking anyway. Maybe there’ll be money inside one of the containers. Just one. A coffin, maybe.

TYLER

Ooh, a baby coffin. That’d be super depressing. And deep.

JAMES

Yeah. I mean, maybe.

TYLER

Dude, you’re sitting on a brilliant idea. Containers are filled with empty promises! I totally get it. It’s like that consumer packaging capitalism…fucking democracy congress libertarian tea party shit.

JAMES

I feel like you’re just saying words, now.

TYLER

Right! Empty, like your baby coffin. Unless there’s money in it. Or an actual baby.

JAMES

Shit, that’s good.

 When I first moved to the city and walked home after dark, I could feel my limbs readying to run, or hurl themselves at testicles. The easy-to-remember “fight-or-flight” response to fear. 

I hadn’t heard about the third option, freeze, until a few days ago. It makes sense. Say you’re a praire dog and in comes a coyote. You’d rather not die, so you flee, you fight back, or you play dead. 

Two nights this week I dreamed I was missing body parts. My right leg, just below the knee, was gone and I was wearing a prosthetic. All through that dream I had forgotten about that fact, and when I rediscovered it, I was disappointed all over again. If you google “dreams about prosthetic limbs” you’ll find it means you’ve restored balance in your life. In the second dream I was missing both legs, had no prosthetics. It’s not a surprise that this suggests you’ve got no balance, can’t or won’t stand up for yourself. 

My favorite dream theory (which I remember vaguely from high school) is that in our sleep, our brains commit images to memory, and the dream is our connecting those images with a story. When I first heard that, as a teenager, it cheapened dreams for me. But now it makes dreams all the more subject to interpretation: the story you make to connect those pictures is all yours. It’s no leap at all, then, to look at your stories and take them a step further once you’re fully awake and analytical. No legs = frozen.

My body is wired to view all sorts of harmless things as threats, and it’s also wired itself to freeze, or play dead, in the face of stress. 

In my screenwriting class, we’re at the stage of developing our characters. (I read a great analogy for this: A seed requires a lot of strength to burst through the hard layer of topsoil. So it builds downward into the softer soil instead, sends forth long and complex root systems until it’s powerful enough to build upward, send its stem aboveground. Building characters is like this. Before you bring one out into the air, he should have a strong root system.) Your main character cannot be weak. She has to want things, badly. It’ll be a challenge, because my main character, Erin, is frozen - but, luckily, seething under the surface. She doesn’t know whether she’s frozen from fear or laziness. She lives in Gravesend, Brooklyn, among old women tending to their rose gardens, wearing soft-colored muumuus. 

The other night I was having a conversation with my friend Michelle, a poet and teacher. She talked about how, in the past, she’s had teachers broach the topic of how to write about difficult things without sending yourself into a downward spiral. No teachers of mine have brought this up, but I realized that so far, I haven’t really touched any subjects that would risk such a strong, negative internal reaction. The idea for this screenplay is the first thing that could do that. Rather than be afraid, I’m (uncharacteristically) excited to write this thing. I took the requisite steps to ensure that Erin is not me - that way I can stretch, torture, and manipulate her into being an interesting main character - but she’ll be wading through my water. With legs. She’ll have to have legs for that. And I’ll have to have legs to write it. Not technically, but, you know what I mean.

A promo video for the Young American Writers Project (YAWP). Watch me teach/say something stupid around 4:55.