INTROVERT: So I Married an Extrovert

  We are almost halfway through the holidays that I've been looking forward to for weeks now.  And once again, I find myself looking forward to the end of them, so I can have a break!  When will I learn? I wrote in my blog last year about this , but I seem to have a delete memory button every time the holidays are over about it, and I'm like Dory - 'Ooh look another holiday, yeay, I'll get a break!' I've got a reminder in my calendar every year, four weeks before the kids finish school in December, to remind me to tell all my colleagues (we are a group of small business owners, working in a shared office space, and we all have kids still at school) to get the last appointments booked and then clear their schedules, as the last two weeks of term are going to be a whirlwind of  end of year events,  Christmas card writing,  deciding on teacher gifts, and school celebrations   And then suddenly - the kids are home for 6 weeks (it's our long summer holiday here

Sometimes sitting in silence is a really lovely thing.  Finally getting my Extrovert husband to enjoy sitting in a room with me, with no TV on, just reading our books, was the day I knew it was a forever relationship. 🥰📚 But sometimes silence is not a thing of beauty. When it is an uncomfortable silence, and one or both of you are sitting second-guessing what the other is thinking, things can get out of hand quickly. Being able to really understand the different ways you each think, and the opposite feelings you might have about doing certain activities, is so important, so that you can both find simple moments when maybe a compromise would not feel so hard. Understanding both my personality type, and my husbands as well, has made life so much easier for us all (including our children!). Sometimes I have had an overwhelming week at work or with kids, and I just can't do anything at the weekend except read, sleep-in, and generally recharge. If I've had a week like this, I can

I’m trying to keep a promise to myself.  It shouldn’t be difficult, but it is.  It’s just to be myself.  How hard can it be?!! But literally decades of  -‘Fake it ‘til you make it!!’,  - trying to be an extrovert,  - pushing myself to the point of exhaustion,  - keeping up with my extrovert husbands socialising (historically by plying myself substantially with alcohol) has left me overwhelmed and almost devoid of energy most days.  So recently, when I made the nerve-wracking decision to do more writing and to (eek! 😳) share it more openly and honestly, as myself - I was surprised, after the initial flurry of gut-wrenching nerves about real people - who I might actually know! - reading my blog, that the feeling morphed into something else.  I realised I felt a huge sense of freedom.  Freedom from hiding behind the persona I’d spent over 40 years creating.  Freedom to speak out about things I’m passionate about - I’m not one for confrontation, but I do like having big conversations abou

Hmm, not always true is it? I had a good friend tell me many years ago that once she turned 40, she didn't care what people thought of her any more. I found myself surprisingly then looking forward to turning 40. But my 40th came and went, and my consistent fear of what others thought of me and what I did or didn't do, stayed firmly front of mind. If anything, it got worse, for a while. I would worry about what I hadn't achieved in my life. About things in my past that I wished I could go back and change. Was I a 'good enough' wife and mum? What's the point of the work that I do? And of course, about whether I should pursue writing, which I'd wanted to do for a long, long time. I am so uncomfortable with confrontation, that the idea of saying or doing something that might offend someone actually makes me freeze, and do...nothing! Putting things off, procrastination, fear of failure. All of these were a daily part of my overthinking (covered in a previous ep

  I love flowers.  I love how they brighten up a room just by existing. And wallflowers are particularly beautiful, being so determined to shine subtly from amongst the blandness of the grey rock or rust-coloured bricks they are so often surrounded by…  Ok so that’s not quite how others see them, but it’s how I see them. 😉 Then you have the idiom ‘wallflower’, as described on Wikipedia.. "A wallflower is someone with an introverted personality type (or in more extreme cases, social anxiety) who will attend parties and social gatherings, but will usually distance themselves from the crowd and actively avoid being in the limelight. The name itself derives from the eponymous plant's unusual growth pattern against a wall as a stake or in cracks and gaps in stone walls. 'Wallflowers' might literally stand against a wall and simply observe others at a social gathering, rather than mingle. This could be due to anxiety, shyness, lack of social skills or self-esteem." Sig

  If I had a $ for every time someone told me to "stop being so sensitive " during my lifetime. Let’s just say, I’d be paying people to ghost-write this blog for me, or to at least edit the mistakes out of it🤣🤣! Jokes aside, it’s been a recurring theme, and - I can’t deny, sometimes I have been seriously over-reacting to situations, and can look back and completely see where the person was coming from.  How-ever..🤨 My high sensitivity is actually a bit of a superpower, and I’m very proud of it, so I get quite defensive of it. It’s almost like another personality (I have a few, as those who know me well would agree - many had no clue I was an introvert in my party years!😈🤘🎸), and she has helped me avoid making some pretty bad decisions in my life by putting up the red flags and blowing sirens in my ears! So when she tells me to jump, I can tend to ask how high, without question. My trust is that strong. The fight or flight response that my body has to certain situations

  I often wonder who I write this for.  It is for me? Is it for the other Introverts out there who happen to find themselves confused and married to an Extrovert, and frantically started googling looking for help? Most likely it was for myself, initially, to have a place to put my thoughts. It's become my journal I suppose. I've loved writing for so many years, but not been able to dedicate any real time to it. whether it was writing stories at school (my poor mum, the times she had to go into my primary school and explain to the teacher that the stories I wrote were completely made up and I hadn't actually for example, been viciously attacked by a dog in my pram as a baby..) , writing letters to friends and family as I grew up and left home, and then when social media and the internet took over, I gravitated there and began finding my way around the new shorter forms of communication.  Some were more formal - I had to do lots of writing through work, sales and marketing c

Ha ha, laughed the Cheshire Cat, at the irony of the situation Alice found herself in. I've been lucky enough over the last couple of years, to live somewhere that has not been highly affected by multiple, long lock-downs due to Covid 19. Not to say there's been none, but in comparison to many others I know of, we've been pretty lucky where I am.  But I cannot deny that I often had little wistful moments of thinking how blissful it would be to have to work from home, the way many people were all over the world. Ah, the introverts dream -  having nowhere to go,  staying at home,  doing whatever, whenever.... Except that's not the reality, right? The 'dream' doesn't have work, or children, or Extroverted husbands in it - they are a fuzzy, faint background concept that doesn't really factor in the best parts of the dream (sorry, beautiful family - I DO love you!)  I've been a passionate and vocal advocate for flexible working for a number of years now.

Recently, I've been trying to make time to respond and comment online, about issues I really care about.  It's not something that comes naturally to me.  Actually, that's not completely true - it comes naturally to me to have a strong opinion about things, to have something to say. But actually saying it - well, that is not so easy. I got to the point where I was so fed up of  spending ten minutes carving out the perfect response, the right words, not too much or too little, so as not to bore people,  then another oh - anywhere between 30 minutes, to a week or so - reading it, re-reading it, checking six times for mistakes,  thinking about who might read it, and how it might offend them, and whether I was prepared for any backlash or misunderstanding that might come from my intended response,  and whether I had considered my comments from all possible angles.  Sometimes I'd even go off down the rabbit hole doing research, to be open-minded about my opinion, and make sur