Horseshoe Crabs in a Cave

I have learned this before but I manage to keep forgetting it.  I'm bad at intimacy.  For someone as social and extroverted as I am, I am extremely private in important ways.  Each of my dearest friends, my parents, past boyfriends, if you interviewed them they'd all describe the experience of having me disappear on them, or withhold what I'm working on or thinking about, and re-emerge a month or so later and say, "oh, yeah, did I mention I'm quitting my job" or "I guess I didn't tell you that I broke up with him," or something like that.  I don't literally disappear -- at least not often.  But I divert conversation away from me when I'm mulling something.  I don't know why I do it.  It's a habit, not an intention.  I appear to be good at revelation and depth and shared introspection but the landscape of my soul has a dark cave in it, with lampreys and moray eels and a lot of horseshoe crabs scuttling around it, and that's where my big decisions get made and processed.  I'll snorkel around with you all day pointing at the angelfish and the sharp coral and the skates and the anemones, maybe diving down to pull a spiny lobster out from within a complex twist of coral, but when you're not looking I'll kick my flipper and disappear into that cave for a while. 

This came up this weekend, when on Monday morning with my sweetie I mentioned, oh yeah, did I tell you about that big decision I made while you were gone?  Hmm, no, I hadn't mentioned it at all, actually.  I suppose I didn't tell you about this other decision I made too?  Nope.  Right.  He asked me why and I had no good answer.  There are bad answers -- about independence and perfectionism and trust, but nothing useful. 

I talked to Housemate about it today, still mulling it over.  She said she got angry one day a few months ago while driving her car, and ended up yelling at me in the empty car because I was withholding friendship.  True, I was.  Not sure why.  I've been by other folks for the same kind of thing over the years.  It's something I do.  She reminded me of conversations we had in college, where we decided that the secret of the two of us is that contrary to appearances, I'm actually an introvert, preferring to sneak off alone to work things out and only describe them when they were finished, while she, although far less social, involves other people during the process of figuring out what she feels.  Hmmm. 

This isn't who I want to be. 

Comments

[Jill]

I think that's pretty normal and okay, myself. I think lots of people who are extroverted have private corners that they let other people into only very slowly. Everybody's shy sometimes, and in different ways! :) And lots of people who are extroverted on the surface need their loved ones to approach them gently and ask them questions about what's going on with them on the inside, and not just assume that what's on the outside is all there is, or that the extroverted person has the tools for sharing intimate, inside things the way an introverted person might. I'm pretty introverted, and my partner is pretty extroverted, and my approaching him gently and asking him lots of questions, and realizing that he might be way more uncomfortable sharing what's going on inside his head than I might be seems to help a lot and work pretty well.

I think people just have different settings for intimacy and sociability and privacy, and maybe that's okay.

[dgm]

i'm that person, too, but i don't wish otherwise. put another human in front of me and i become a very outgoing person. not-so-deep down, i'm extremely introverted and private in ways similar to the way you describe yourself. it often surprises people who think they know me (but not my husband or my other best friends), but i don't see anything wrong with it.

if you made some kind of major decision that has impacted your sweetie's plans or expectations, or that has somehow misled him, then i could see why he'd be upset. but if you made a decision that was yours and yours alone and he's just hurt you did not consult him first, then at some point maybe he just needs to come around and realize that this is just another facet of the person he fell in love with.

i think that what you've described is simply a coping strategy to handle stress or pain or indecision. as jill said in her comments, it's pretty normal, even for extroverts.

why is it any better to be someone who reveals to others (even those not that intimate) everything she is thinking? personal decisionmaking doesn't have to be a democratic process. don't be so hard on yourself.

[andrew]

I can empathize with much of what you say, I used to do the same, and after the 3rd or 4th time that resulted in messy personal conequences, I learned to recognize the feeling of what I call "my emotional glacier" slowly bulding momentum, even though I was often not sure where it was headed...

I can be so slow to react to things, while I am mulling over stuff in my heart, that my wife and I can have an arguement, and I will only feel the emotion & anger of it days later.. its a useful self defense mechanism, but difficult when you are trying to navigate the terrain of your normal days..

You don't have to change this part of yourself, I can't change my equivalent habit, what you can do, however, is let your partner know you are mulling something, that that glacier is moving somewhere in you... that before you dive into your private underwater cave, make wordless eye contact across the masks and let them know you will be back sometime...

if they love you for YOU, they let you dive, don't insist on following, and then welcome you back without expecting anything momentous.. (this makes it also easier to talk to them about even incomplete reasoning/mulling)

[Bobby]

About eight years ago, one of my best friends, who's introverted by nature, didn't tell me he had a new girlfriend until more than a month after it happened. It did kind of hurt, but he made a point of telling me immediately when he got engaged. I was one of his groomsmen in his wedding.

I don't want to judge whether you should involve your friends, family and boyfriend in your very personal decisions. But if I had a girlfriend, I'd probably feel hurt if as our relationship developed, she didn't tell me more about what she was thinking. However, in no way am I saying that you have to do so.

In terms of why you withhold part of yourself, it could be that's just the way you're genetically wired. Or perhaps something taught you when you were young that that was the best way to protect yourself emotionally. Or perhaps a combination of both. I have an attorney friend who by nature is very shy. For years, I had problems engaging her in conversation. Yet, if you look at her blog, she sounds like a totally different person with a different voice. It seems that the way her mind is wired, she finds it easier to express her thoughts in writing in solitude than verbally in conversation.

I believe that many people are inherently contradictory. Like Thomas Jefferson, who wrote about all of us being created equal yet he had slaves. As well as a mistress of color. He insisted upon holding to the letter of the Constitution, yet disregarded it to do the Louisiana Purchase.

While that may smack of hypocrisy, I wonder if being contradictory is just the way we are.

It definitely makes you a more interesting person, when your attributes conflict with each other - when you are very welcoming to people in your life and social yet someone who finds intimacy difficult. -- when you don't immediately share your very personal decisions to those closest to you, yet you discuss many of your personal thoughts on the Internet for hundreds to see.

No matter what other people think, the question is do you feel your emotional needs in the area of intimacy are being met?

[Kez]

I often have difficulty opening up as well. Especially with the current interest. I think my feelings are obvious, but I guess just thinking that may not convey such things. So I just sent him an email clarifying our most recent phone conversation, in effect saying "yes I do want you here, despite the fact that I'm studying for the bar exam." If only he could understand that he's much more distracting when he's gone, because I do not communicate my feelings well over the phone.

[PG]

Perhaps this ties into your post about lack of girliness. At least, reflecting on what you said there led me to think about how I'm often reluctant to open up my uncertainties to people, and this can lead me to make decisions in a way that seems abrupt even to me, but that actually is a result of the unexposed thought process.

[Misty Brewer]

I HATE THE WEB PAGE IT LOOKS LIKE CRAP !!!!!!! IT SUCKS REALLY REALLY BAD !!!!!! NOW DONT GO AND KILL YOUR SELF B/C OF THIS BUT THE TRUTH HURTS !!!!!!!!!!