"the power of introverts ep1" inspired by the book "quiet".

Issues about whether such labelling's necessary aside,

this video reminds me of my experiences during the negotiation workshop held over the past 3 days. Now to set the context - "Quiet: the power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking' by Susan Cain is a book about how Western culture misunderstands and undervalues the traits and personalities of introverted people. I've always wanted read it (after watching Susan Cain's TED talk sometime at the start of the year), simply because it makes you feel better to know that "not thinking aloud, writing thoughts out instead of speaking", "preferring to recharge by being alone", "thinking too much" and "working slowly" are not traits that are unacceptable. This is contrary to what I've always believed (especially in secondary school when I was much less comfortable in my own skin), because such behaviour have caused me much sadness.

So, the negotiation workshop, organized by our wonderful prof in Tembusu College - a 3 day workshop teaching us the skills of.. well, negotiating. We were given the chance to do role-playing and negotiate with different cases and issues at hand, 1-1 parties, 2-2 parties, 3-3 parties, and even a 27 party, 6 hour long negotiation on the last day. It was fun, no doubt, learning ways to come to a common consensus with another party that had totally differing interests from you at first.

But it was only great for me in 1-1 pairings, because I just shut up most of the time when working with bigger groups. There's so much more stimulation when there's a big group of people and it's so difficult to think aloud. There's no time to write down and straighten out my thoughts when a question is posed, there's the pressure to respond immediately. So I ended up switching off half the time. And the fact that I'm afraid of saying the wrong things/saying things that might be different from the viewpoints of my group members did not help. I wonder if the people thought I was dumb or stupid or useless back there. I'm sorry, I really honestly cannot think in the presence of people (the maximum is just one other person, or two people that can be trusted completely). Discounting such times, the workshop was really fun, and perhaps very much so for people who aren't like me. I'd like to thank my lucky stars for giving me a place in Tembusu where there are so many opportunities to learn.

Back to introversion. Oddly, there's another side of me that's completely loud and talkative and crazy in front of people I'm comfortable with, be it in big or small groups. And the friendly me who says hi to everyone and can talk to strangers and can do small talk with acquaintances (even though I hate it). Sometimes I feel odd. There are so many pieces of me. I wish to have more alone time in school, but I'm still searching for someone who can understand me completely so, I can't cut back on trying to socialize yet.

There's an exceptional number of people here who think aloud and aren't afraid to voice out their thoughts here. Sometimes I can't help but fear that they'd think I'm "not up there enough" because nobody knows what I'm thinking. Being "good enough", especially intellectually, is a really big thing here. I don't like to tell people who I am (or maybe there really isn't a need). They only see the bubbly, crazy side of me. And since I'm not that horrible at socialising (if i want to), people just assume I like talking. I don't. It makes me tired.

This justifies the existence of this blog, because technically there's no target audience and technically I'm not telling anybody about who I am; but if any one reads this and understands what I want most is not just someone to 'get high' with, but someone who can talk to me about things we care deeply about, then that'd be great.

Ok I blog mostly because it'd terrible to lose track of who you are at any point of time.

I wonder if this is called self absorption.