On being a shy extrovert

"Vulnerability is [...] having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome." -- Brené Brown

Last week I wrote about feeling weary of feeling lonely. The writing of it was very hard to tease out, but - and I keep discovering this - as I pushed though things and disciplined myself to just write (without pressure to publish but just for the sake of doing it), I felt a lot lighter.

I'm not sure what came over me the day after that but in a moment of boldness I later posted on the Year of Creativity Facebook group (and y'all know I do not use Facebook) to introduce myself for the first time (3 months into the year!) and I decided to share my blog. (Many of the ladies have already shared their blogs, published articles, social media accounts, other projects, etc.)

I had yet to speak up on the group and so, in typical me fashion, I typed with trepidation. I couldn't help but share that I'm an Ennegram 6, and that I was thus afraid that publicly sharing my blog would cause me to stop writing.

I was overwhelmed by the outpouring of responses, the encouragement to keep going, and the reassurance that I am not alone.

Apparently I had been keeping these feelings of despair to myself because I didn't want to be a burden to other people. I didn't even want to put the words to paper because I felt like I deserved to feel the burden of it. (Such is the insidious nature of isolation, whether self-imposed or not.)

But now I wonder if the truest form of opening up isn't burdensome to others, but is instead an opportunity for others to see me as I am. It doesn't demand but rather gently invites.

The same evening after I took that step to share myself in internet land, I spontaneously invited two of my neighbors and their kids over to play in our yard after dinner. To my delight, they responded with quick and eager yesses.

The chill had let up a bit as the day had progressed (as is often the case in Seattle), and I exhilarated in the thrill of having friends to chat with on the back deck as we watched the kids play on the grass and the golden glow settled on the cherry blossoms.

After they left, and we put the kids down for bed, I found myself with an unexpected energy as I tidied up the toys and cleared the kitchen.

It was a simple gathering, in which there had been no planning or food (two of my specialties) - although decaf and Bailey's was offered - but which was thoroughly satisfying for me. And while we didn't have super deep and share-all-your-darkest-secrets conversation, I was the most energized I had been in a long time.

Since that evening I've made a simple connection for me that is changing my perspective in this current season of life for me.

The connection pertains to Susan Cain's Quiet, in which the author proposes two dimensions to personality, the introversion-extroversion axis and the orthogonal axis that measures how anxious/calm or stable an individual (whether introverted or extroverted) is.

(This article, also by Cain, maps those axes to the four humors, with which I am very familiar from Stephen Ministry training, and which also explains the nuanced difference between my and David's extroversion.)

The ah-ha moment for me is that I'm an anxious or shy extrovert. (I've always joked that I'm an extroverted homebody, as in, Everybody come to me, but this categorization of Anxious really puts some legs on this thing.)

I love being with people but I dislike putting myself out there. I think this predicament is amplified by being an Enneagram 6. I am excellent at being a chameleon: I wait to see what others think first, so that I can present only the parts of myself that are congruent with them.*

(*I think this is why blogging is super scary for me, because although some close friends know every dimension and plane of me, I am wont to keep different circles of friendships in which I am a certain version of me. This supposedly is to protect me (from ostracization?), but I do it at the expense of authenticity. It sounds sad when I type this out. Sigh.

So when I tell new friends that I have a blog, I sort of cringe and think, "oh no, they are going to read something that reveals a different part of me that I'm afraid they will reject me for." And there are definitely people I want to be friends with with whom I haven't shared my blog because I am afraid of what they will think.)

Naming this disparity for myself - the fact that I get energy from people but I'm shy to be the first to put myself out there - helped me realize how I actually have more control over my life than I thought I did. I may not have control over how many deep and abiding friendships I can secure (intentionally clingy word choice there), but I can take a simple step (which may or not be related) which is to get my extroverted needs met. This - at its simplest - means to to make plans with people, spend time with them, go out and find people. So adultish, but yes, it is, after all, my responsibility to get my needs met.

For when I feel energized I am a more interesting person which ultimately reinforces my efforts to develop deeper community.

So I guess my goal now is to be aware (and accepting) of my need to be with people (just as I respect and support introverts I know who need alone time to recharge) and, with self-compassion, support myself in the quest to fill my days with more friend time. Sounds like a plan, right? (Insert self-five.)

P.S. I just read the chapter in Quiet on Asian-Americans which discusses my hometown Cupertino and even mentions my high school (!). It made me wonder if I have not adjusted my introvert-extrovert scale to a different culture outside of the Bay.

P.P.S. If anyone else is reading Quiet, I hope you'll comment below and/or text me your thoughts. So far, I'm enjoying it, but also struggling with the lack of differentiation between being introverted and being quiet. I know she tries to bring up that point (and I mention this with the two axes above) but I still think that the analysis is confounded by a subtle confluence between extroversion and expressiveness. I struggle to believe that America or the West is actually necessarily more extroverted than other cultures, but rather that expressiveness and boldness and individualism are elevated in this culture. I don't believe extroversion and expressiveness are the same thing. Anyhoo, maybe I'm misreading this or projecting on it too much.

P.P.P.S. I'd love your comments! Being a grown up means I can "ask for what I want and honor the response" (Richo, How To Be An Adult). Well, this extroverted Enneagram 6 thrives on feedback so I would love to hear from you. :) Thanks, as always, for reading. This is such a good exercise for me, to write and then to be brave by sharing. Thank you so much for being here.

Meta footnote be with you

(With a title like that - so sorry - be prepared for a super stream-of-consciousness post.)

Yeesh, lots of things going on in my mind these days and I am way behind on updates - Christmas, New Years, two birthday, etc.

I have been wavering* about setting up a so-called "editorial calendar" or posting schedule, but I think it could really help me approach my blog with less fear.

[*Lisa footnote: the other day I was journalling about how I am lacking structure in life but that the reason I wasn't putting it into place was because I was fearing that I was idolizing it. And yet because God made me this way, maybe that fear message was really from the Enemy. And then I realized one of the labels for my Enneagram type is "Devil's Advocate." (!) Talk about mind-blowing. And then today when I was reading Healing The Purpose of Your Life by the beloved Linns of Sleeping with Bread, they discussed how "one clue to our sealed orders will often be what we like least about ourselves" (65). I wrote in the margin, "my ability to see both sides in every situation, when taken to an extreme, leads me to paralysis / without a guiding center."**]

[**meta-footnote: this is what happens to me when I go a long time without externally processing. I go crazy!]

So. Where does this leave us? I see both sides to the situation:

1. Having a schedule allows me to write without having to think about what I'm going to write about; the topics will have already been decided.

2. Having a schedule may limit what I can write about, and might also prevent me from thinking creatively about other things beyond the plan. Also, it feels like doing what Everyone Else does.

Writing this out, I feel that the cons are somewhat lame: they are my excuse for not wanting to do this, they are what help me feel like I am taking a risk.

I think what I am discovering about myself is that what feels like no big deal to most people feels like A Very Big Deal to me.

***

One benefit of having a schedule will be less of the "random" posts where I lump 2349083284723 different types of information into one post. But until I get to this schedule, bear with me while I dump: (This is supposedly done for your benefit but also so I can close the 2349083284723 tabs open in my browser currently.)

• I loved this article on longing and limits. 
• An interesting, if not provocative, essay entitled "Is Parenthood the Enemy of Creative Work?"
• Currently making my first ever batch of kombucha!
• Okay, this is totally not me, but when I saw this my heart stopped for a second.
• Sometimes doing the most important thing on my list for the day first, even if it seems very minor and certainly not urgent (and thus it doesn't seem prioritized based on schedule optimization), can make a tremendous difference in the flow of my day.
• After listening to the Liturgists talk about meditation, I have been trying to incorporate some (you'd probably call it secular) meditation practice into my life lately. I've been doing it almost every day for over two weeks now and I think it is making a huge improvement in my stress, anxiety, and depression. I think it is also helping me have more patience with others and myself. Insert thumbs up emoji.
• Do you Bullet Journal? (Kendra has the best introduction if you need one.) I have avoided jumping on the bandwagon, despite its seeming similarities to the Moleskine hack for GTD that has worked for me so well for almost 10 years now, and which I keep going back to despite attempts at other planners/life management tools. I am wondering if it will help with my currently-very-scattered brain.
• Related: I finally bought a cheap notebook (ironic because you're probably supposed to use something cheap you have laying around the house that you don't care about, but I #konmari'd those) to do Morning Pages. I found Chris Winfield's article on it through Google today and it finally sold me on it. 
• Also related: when I read this article on the Pomodoro method of productivity on Lifehacker, I thought it was a joke / April Fools' hoax. That was last week. Then today, when clicking around on Chris Winfield's site after discovering him today, I was quite convinced of the benefit of the tool, even if it's just used as a nmemonic device, a way of reminding yourself to mono-task, and to do so for a certain amount of time. I don't have a traditional job, and I don't quite have the freedom to work in eight 25-minute shifts of work every day, but I have (usually) some moments of time to myself every day that are pretty regular (during naps, and independent playtime) that I can use to focus on specific tasks for a set amount of time. Today I made sure to not browse during naps (in general, I'm trying to not do anything while the kids are asleep that I can do while they are awake, such as cleaning, etc.). I got some reading, writing, and thinking done, AND I cleaned up the garage for 21 minutes (I set timers for 8, 7, then 6 minutes). I got a LOT done in less than one hour.
• (Back to the Bullet Journal, one final time. Because it's because I've used a makeshift BuJo for four days that I can even remember some of these randoms to tell you. The Bullet Journal centralizes things that we tend to think are more compartmentalizable. It messes with me and also jives with me. This must be related to the pendulum swing of my mind.)

Okay well I hope I didn't lose my small readership with all that cuh-RAziness! I hope to bring you some more order and structure, but that if I don't do that any time soon, please show me some grace. Thanks everyone!

Get ready for a bunch of randoms.

Lucky Peach Presents 101 Easy Asian Recipes is seriously the bomb. No deep frying, no sub-recipes (i.e., recipes whose ingredient lists are themselves things you need to prepare). Irreverent, bold, nerdy, lazy, pan-Asian. Basically everything I am. I was already sold, and then it came out and used the word "subparenthetically" in the middle of a parenthetical! What the what?! I need.

David and I both finished Scary Close and loved it. (Eunice, I'm sorry I'm so late to the e-book game. For the life of me I could not figure it out two years ago when you gave me a free copy!)

I have also been bawling my eyes out over Lost and Found, the episode on the Liturgists where Science Mike and Michael Gungor tell their stories of their losing their faith. (It's taken me a week and I'm still in part 1 because of all the crying breaks.) This was the first time I've heard the term "deconversion." I resonated with almost everything they are talking about, and it's so validating to have intelligent people articulate some very complex and nuanced and vulnerable things. I also chortled when they talked about Donald Miller and Rob Bell being "dangerous" authors to a Southern Baptist.

Speaking of Bell, listening to Velvet Elvis and enjoying it so far. (The audiobook is actually read by the author, who is, in this case, a great reader. But David listened to Scary Close and the reader - not Don Miller - was not a good match for the book. Alas.)

Annoyed by The Couple Next Door. Shame on me, but I skipped the middle section and read the end. I never do that kind of thing. Oh well.

Also enjoyed The Power of Habit and the perhaps controversial Love Warrior.

Absolutely slayed by my Enneathought a couple of days ago:

Today, explore the issue of boundaries. As a Six, are your boundaries too rigid? Can you trust people to get close to you? Can you share more of your feelings and ideas?

(Yes, Kayla, that was what inspired my notebook entry. ;p)

Invented this dish of steamed tilapia over silken tofu cubes with black bean sauce. We loved the layered textures. (It felt analogous to the Asian carb-on-carb-ness of potatoes and rice as well as reminiscent of Fuschia Dunlop's avocado over silken tofu appetizer.)

Had a super eggplant week with Persian-style eggplant dip and miso-crusted eggplant (both from Liana Krisoff's Vegetarian*), and then yu-xiang eggplant with grass-fed ground beef (amazing!). *Kind of trying to do a cook/book club with this. Slai, can you please give me more details on how you guys did yours?

Finally, gearing up for Thanksgiving season. What are some creative ways you guys are thinking of celebrating Thanksgiving this year?

True uncertainties

In Ian Morgan Cron's deeply moving memoir about growing up as a child of an alcoholic, he relates a story about wrestling with his wife about letting their children jump off a 40-foot ledge into a spring-water filled quarry in Dorset, Vermont. When his wife finally realizes the nature of his anxiety, she tells him, "Ian, they're not falling; they're jumping." I completely identified with his sense of his life having felt like "spiritual and emotional free fall" - and to realize that taking a leap is a completely different thing from falling.

***

If I could adopt this super adorable quote as my life motto, I think I will have achieved success: "When something goes wrong in your life, just yell, 'Plot Twist!' and move on."

***

For my senior thesis in Asian American Literature, I managed to combine my degrees in Chemical Biology with English by claiming the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle as a lens for understanding translation of language and culture in literature.

I purported that in translation you can achieve accuracy or precision, but not both at the same time. You could literally translate a phrase from say, Chinese, to English, which might be a translation of precision (where you map one word in one language to its counterpart in the other language), but it may not be a translation of accuracy, whereby the meaning and intent is captured as well.

Being able to have either precision or accuracy (but not at the same time) might also be a useful framework for accessing truth in general. Henri Nouwen said it best in his book Reaching Out when he talks about grasping at "true uncertainties" rather than at false certainties.

For someone who loves categories and definitions so much, I struggle with the true ambiguities that are necessary when perceiving Truth.

***

The Enneagram (though I hated it at first) really enlightened me to my constant tug-of-war with paradoxes. Being a 6, I vacillate between needing support (societally, spiritually, personally, communally, etc.) and wanting to come at life on my own, out of my own courage and even vulnerability.

And with that, let's now end this post with a cartoon that pretty much sums up my life.

Be the boss of myself

The other day I received a thoughtful gift, but because of my new life philosophy of not keeping things unless I love them, even (or especially) if they were free or gifted.

It was a super thoughtful gift, something that's useful for a particular thing I actually really enjoy, but I didn't want to own this object; it only served a few purposes, and I didn't particularly care for the aesthetic.

The item was about $36 and Amazon was going to charge me $6 for the return shipping if I used the UPS label they provide. It sucked to see that deduction, so I dilly-dallied for a moment, considering the pay-my-own-shipping route, or figuring out another way to off-load this gift in an "economical" way. After letting myself analyze for about one to two minutes, I cut myself off and told myself that I needed to "be the boss of myself." 

As part of this new season of my life, I'm trying to act the way I want to feel. Sitting in front of the screen, I said to myself, "In this moment, I'm going to act like my time is worth $100/hr." I didn't want to spend any more of my precious time debating how to minimize the $6 loss of returning it. If I spent even two minutes on the thinking, and my time is worth $100/hr, that was $3.33 right there. If I spent even two more minutes debating, I would have exceeded the perceived $6 loss I was trying to avoid.

And this was for a gift that I didn't spend any money buying in the first place. I felt so grown up being able to:

1) Receive the gift with gratitude.

2) Decide quickly to return it because I didn't want/need it.

3) Let myself do my analyzing thing. I can't help myself.

4) Stop myself from doing my analyzing thing for too long. .

5) Move on with life.

Ultimately I chose to value my life more than money. 

One of the paradoxes of adulthood is the concept of being the boss of yourself, which necessarily means you are both the boss and the one being bossed around. 

Is this hard or is this easy?

When you're the boss of yourself you can do handstands at home. #leanagainst

Prompts for the Studious, or, A shameless call for comments:

1) What are your thoughts on the concept of waiting for permission?

2) What do you want right now in life that you are waiting for permission for?
3) What are some paradoxes you're pondering?
4) Anything else that stuck out to you?
5) Can you tell that I used to be a Bible study leader for a campus ministry?

More from me:

• Being your own best friend
• Being your own therapist