When I was young, I took after my dad; I was loud, witty, and very funny for a toddler. I would crack jokes to whole groups of strangers, and the crowd would roar with pleasantly surprised laughter. I fed off of others' positive attention, and I thoroughly believed that it was my calling to become a comedian. Then, something happened. As I grew up, crowds began to scare me. I would bite my tongue when I had something to say. I began to shun the spotlight. What was happening to me? Oh, great. I was becoming an introvert.
This gradual change in behavior began when I was about 6 or 7 years old (ironically right about when school started), but even then, I saw the disappointing side effects, and I had a seemingly life-long identity crisis. I began to see that this new crippling shyness was like a gray, expressionless cloak that masked my true personality and made me appear uninteresting to the average passerby, and therefore unworthy of their time. I had become a walking false advertisement, and it infuriated me.
Making friends became a real challenge, especially in middle school. I was always very nice to people, but I never made friends with people I truly related to on a personal level, and I found it increasingly impossible to do so. I had a very off sense of humor, an almost obsessive passion for old music, and even though I appeared like a decent student, I was really a terrible procrastinator and was flunking nearly all of my classes. Of course, there was no way anyone could have known that, because I preferred to hide who I really was for fear of attention, and moreover, negative judgement. I spent a vast majority of my school days feeling tremendously misunderstood, and very out of place within my little group of academically-minded girls with Taylor Swift overflowing their iPods. I came to accept the fact that I would probably always be a little off, and that maybe I was destined to never have human friends and that I was just supposed to play Jimi Hendrix alone in my apartment full of cats. I embraced this image of my supposed destiny and I almost grew content with it.
I learned early on that I wouldn't ever be a social butterfly, and that I needed to find another way to express myself. Thus began my journey into the vast world of the arts. I tried almost everything- painting, singing, photography, guitar, drama- and although I found an amount of pleasure in each of these, (except drama- trust me, my acting is worse than William Shatner)
...none of them seemed to allow enough room for me to express every element of my personality. I wanted for people to understand that I was a complex individual that was not only shy, but also ironic and sentimental and poetic and psychotic and paranoid and strange and self-conscious and cultured. For some reason, it was always very important for me to be known and understood by other humans. Still, I was unfortunately cursed with a mouth that would never open if my life depended on it. My life had become an intense battle between my longing to be known and my fear of attention.
Sometime in 6th grade, however, after being bullied relentlessly by just about every social group, I found a form of expression that finally did me justice. It was my saving grace that enabled me to express my true personality without having to socialize- writing. Ever since I was little, I loved telling stories. My dream job was to be an author, dating back to around 1st grade. It's safe to say that I was no stranger to writing.
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It wasn't until middle school, however, that I learned that all my eccentric thoughts and feelings and beliefs could be articulated on paper well in advance, and people could read it and genuinely understand me. In the social realm, I could barely scratch the surface of my opinions to people. On paper, I could write whole monologues and actually catch people's attention. People didn't have to comb through my verbal fumblings to get to the core message. I could say exactly what I mean with zero eye contact, first impressions, or misjudgements. I had the epiphany that writing didn't have to just a be a fun pass-time; it could actually be used as a tool to get people to understand who the real Amelia was. And this was the most power I had ever had.
All throughout my school days, I kept journals that dripped with sarcastic observations, lame puns, and passionate philosophies about the future. I'd use these mostly to burn excess angst, but I found that they began to help me tremendously when school called for writing assignments. I poured my heart and soul in any assignment that allowed room for such pursuits. I could get by with essays, but I found that my specialty was in story telling.
In my freshman year of high school, I had the strangest notion that acting was my calling (WHAT were you THINKING Amelia?) and I took drama. The class intimidated me on a level I didn't know was possible, but one day, I saw a grand opportunity that made it all worth it. I decided to write a play. This wasn't at all an assignment- no one asked me to expend this amount of energy on writing something. What compelled me to perform this classic act of nerdery was not for any praise- I had just developed the desire to write a comedy to see how well it would turn out. I spent about a week putting it together, and I humbly showed it to my drama teacher for overall feedback. Much to my chagrin and overall horror, she decided to make copied for the whole class to read this amateur musical I had whipped up in my spare time. I was mortified by the attention, and I was consumed with fear over what these students were thinking of me as they read it.
To my surprise, however, the class enjoyed it thoroughly. They laughed at all the right spots and afterwards expressed genuine desire to see it performed. What amused me the most about this, however, was that when the were told who wrote the play, the average reaction was "Who?" This thing I wrote had made me go from a quiet, uninteresting nobody to a clever, talented Amelia. The experience proved to me how amazingly special this whole 'writing' thing was for me in my life, and that I could use it to flaunt the kind of person I was in the way I did best.
Of course, being an introvert still provides its fair amount of frustrations. I can't just write a letter to everyone I want to get to know. I still have constant internal battles regarding my cripplingly lame social skills. It's a bitter truth that I'll always have to put up with. Still though, I can't emphasize enough how thankful I am that writing exists. The amount of words floating in my head is endless, and one day, I may even be able to make a decent occupation out of it. My biggest weakness had introduced me to my biggest strength, and if that's not personal growth, I don't know what is.
