One reason why I’m resigned to our eternally mobile, friend-leaving, oh-God-another-move-is-immanent lifestyle is because it’s basically the ideal exercise for an introvert like me.  It’s been well-documented that I can live really, really contentedly without ever remotely stretching myself personally or professionally, so I could very easily be someone who has never left her hometown, has two or three friends who she’s all known since kindergarten, and who works a boring and somewhat dead-end job that has led her to count down the years to retirement ever since her early 20s.  Not that there’s anything wrong with living in your hometown or keeping your childhood friends — far from it — but I could see Alternate Universe Katie getting stuck in ultimately unfulfilling patterns because she’s too scared to do anything else.

Given the fact that I find socializing so exhausting, it’s been odd to realize (as I have only very recently) that I can also come off pretty strong.  I mean, Pete is the kind of person who can confidently walk into a room full of people that he doesn’t know, certain that he’ll make a friend or at least have an interesting conversation or two.  I, on the other hand, will linger awkwardly outside the door or duck behind a large potted plant for cover before losing courage altogether and making my escape.

It’s here, in yet another bundle of new social settings and contexts, that I’ve realized I’ve nevertheless learned to give my opinion very decidedly for so young a person (as her ladyship says).  Really, if there’s one skill that endless graduate work in English should give you, it’s the ability to think critically and analyze originally and incisively.*  If there is one skill that has run through all of my disparate teaching work, it is the importance of learning how, when, and why to make an argument.

The common character trait that’s always run through my friends is a theme and variations upon curiosity: the desire, always humming along somewhere in the background, to know why something is the way it is, what people think about such-and-such a a thing, how things work, or how my view is different from yours.  Such topics are important and enjoyable, so why pretend not to have them?  Why would I want to dumb myself down, couching what I wonder and think about in a haze of protective I-thinks and well-maybe-it-could-bes and I-dunnos?  I am interested in the world, but sometimes, as I enter it, I realize that this kind of sometimes-intense interest isn’t the culturally-sanctioned norm for comfortably married women soon entering their 30s.  And that’s just the thing: I am not a second-grader, alienating her peers with an oddly encyclopedic knowledge of certain random topics.  I am not Hermione Granger, throwing her hand in the air to respond to every question asked in a class full of eye-rolling teenagers.  If I’m not supposed to think, and learn, and discuss now, then when?  And is this really a tendency I should feel the need to protect other people from?

It’s odd that I’m so comfortable with this important part of being me, when I still can’t make myself walk through doorways or dial most phone numbers.  Even if I never grow out of hiding behind potted plants, this will be no small consolation.

* Being able to lord it over people that you have actually read the entirety of Ulysses or the unabridged Clarissa is, however, a perk that you can carry in your back pocket to out-snob the very occasional person who decides to boorishly impress you, unsolicited, with particularly pretentious descants upon lit-rat-CHAH.

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