This post isn’t fitness-related per se, but since I believe that our goal of achieving “fitness” should cover all areas of human needs–the physical, mental, emotional, spiritual–I am going to post this one, if only in the hopes of making other people understand the way I, or rather we, are.

I am an introvert. There, I said it. I am not gregarious, I am not innately sociable, I do not have a driving need to be surrounded by other people. I value solitude and alone-time. I can be in the company of other people and still remain silent, and that is perfectly fine with me. I am happy being lost in my own thoughts.

However, this nature of mine, combined with my decidedly Asian looks (especially the chinky eyes) leads a lot of people to assume that I am just haughty, bitchy, or arrogant. While I do admit to thinking disdainful thoughts when other people open their mouths and let their own stupidity spew out of it (there I go again), I am not a mean person by nature and I do not do things out of spite. (Well, when I’m sufficiently pissed, sometimes I do.)

That being said, it hurts when society rewards other people–that is, extroverts–for being “happy”, “fun”, or, to use a term heard from work the other day, “delightful” while ignoring the things that we introverts also bring to the table.

The other night an informal “awards” ceremony was done at work, basically to “honor” or “show appreciation” to those people who made a significant contribution to our recently-concluded first quarter of the fiscal year. With my area contributing more than 30% to our sales volume and being the one handling our top two accounts, I admit that I kind of expected that I would get some sort of recognition for my work (a huge mistake, and yes, I know, a discussion about “expectations” and how to manage them is in order; I probably will write about that at some point in the future). However, the awards came and went, and there was no mention of my name at all. The next morning I overheard one of the “awards committee” members congratulating one of the awardees, saying that she got that award for being “delightful”.

WTF.

So it’s a popularity contest, then. Regardless of the numbers you post, regardless of the work you put in, being recognized boils down to whether people find you “delightful” or not. While I do realize that that “awarding” ceremony was just something that they did “for fun” (at least, I hope so–I hope it doesn’t have any bearing on my performance appraisal), and as such I shouldn’t let myself be affected by it, it still stung when they didn’t call out my name.

I’ve left a lot out in this post of mine, and being so my rant will probably trigger some questions and long-winded discussions about several of my points above. So before a barrage of angry comments can flood my inbox, I would like to repost this article I read earlier from The Atlantic, hoping this will bring more light to understanding introverts.