I am so deeply introverted that I’m surprised I can function in the external world. And arguably, I never really have. I’m happy that I can hold a job now, and that I can find joy in making connections with other people. I’m actively seeking out friends who share my interests, and who can somewhat sympathize with my temperament. But it took a quarter of a life to understand my personal need to be alone most of the time, to self-reflect constantly, and the practical need to achieve success in a culture that demands gregariousness out of you in order to be noticed.

College was the first time my personality decidedly clashed with my environment. My high school was very forgiving of my reticence, to the point of indulgence. The style of teaching there never required debate or class participation for an “A” grade, so I was luckily able to project the erroneous impression that I had it together and could later handle a place like Harvard. I felt comfortable in an English class if I was writing silently for 50 minutes. If ever a class discussion sprouted, like an unaccountable sprig in a crack of asphalt, I would watch with envy as the courageous students proffered their opinions for judgment. I couldn’t bring myself to raise my voice, to mutter words. I just couldn’t construct sentences orally under those conditions; there has always been a divide between my writing and speaking skills. If I don’t have time to be methodical, analytical—slow—I will stumble over my desire to be insightful in an efficient amount of words.

If you don’t count answering factual questions, I spoke less than ten times in class discussions across four years of high school. I know the count because the times I did talk were milestone events in my chronology. When I watched Kenneth Lonergan’s brilliant 2011 film Margaret many years after senior English, with Anna Paquin engaging her classroom interlocutors with fiery earnestness, I wondered whether high school classes like that really existed. Do people actually arrange their desks in a circle and argue about stuff in high school? Am I supposed to suspend disbelief a little, or is this cinematic realism? How typical was my education: is the issue more of a public school versus private school thing, south versus north, city versus metropolis? I don’t even know the answers today.

My fear of interacting in even a low-stakes environment like the high school classroom portended a deepening issue. It wasn’t just how strong my particular introversion was, or how difficult it made my attempts to assimilate with my sociable classmates. My problem was, more precisely, an introversion compounded by significant social anxiety. Turning inward helped me process my thoughts, but I also turned inward because I greatly feared criticism and embarrassment.

My record for not speaking up continued into college—except this time, instead of being lionized for my paper-and-pencil work, I completely floundered.

I did try a little bit in the beginning. During the first year of college, Harvard freshmen all eat in a capacious dining hall named Annenberg. In orientation I’d been given the advice to sit down next to strangers with my tray full of meat products (I was born a Texan) and introduce myself.

“Hi, I’m Niels. I’m thinking of studying economics, and I live in Wigglesworth.”

This is the standard (name, field of study, house) ordered tuple of introduction. This is networking at eighteen.

But by the time everyone else was three weeks into the fall semester, relationships had been formed. Whether through classes or interest groups or sports or networking or prep school coalitions, people had found each other. It quickly stopped making sense for me to indiscriminately waylay someone in Annenberg with my salutatory tuple. I decided to eat as early as possible so that I wouldn’t have to deal with the pressure of being seen eating alone. Dinner was served during the bizarre interval of 5:00 to 7:30, so I had to eat my last meal of the day at 5:00 like a senior availing himself of his IHOP discount. But it was so important to me to preserve that selfhood, the liberating anonymity of being fucked up without anyone knowing about it.

I had laid the foundations for the rest of my college social life through this avoidance and passivity. In the spring, freshmen form blocking groups to enter the lottery for upperclass housing assignments. I was a singleton, a “floater” in the school’s lexicon. I didn’t know anyone who wanted to room with me, because I didn’t know anyone. So I floated to Cabot House, a place that I enjoyed for two years as a shelter. I continued my ascetic practice of dining at 5:00, and eating briskly at that. Cabot’s dining hall is connected to the dorm rooms through basement hallways, a structure propitious to further minimizing my time outside around other people. I had constructed and solidified a hermit’s existence. And a rock feels no pain. And an island never cries.

The lawn of Cabot. The dining hall is in the distance, at ground level
The lawn of Cabot. The dining hall is in the distance, at ground level

When I went to class, I got my taste of the Margaret discussions. Almost every course had a weekly section with a graduate teaching assistant where the lectures were discussed, participation was quantified, and “reaction papers” were assigned. Here I couldn’t hide. I couldn’t hide if I wanted to do well. I would watch as a few sympathetic TAs would hesitate to cold call me, detecting the pain I was feeling minute by minute as I sustained my squirmy silence. The grad student who ran my sophomore tutorial on economic growth wrote this feedback for me on my final paper:

I would certainly have liked to have heard more from you in class. It is clear from your writing that you have many good and interesting ideas … Above all, be confident! (You deserve to feel more confident about yourself.) Oral communication is an integral part of the economics profession, so it will help to overcome those personal barriers to speaking up in discussions as soon as possible.

It was the most compassionate reaction that I got in response to what I now view as a disorder. I regret that I was not mature enough to recognize how damaging my problems were becoming, and was therefore unappreciative of a rare instance of empathy.

I also met instructors who didn’t understand me at all—and how could I expect them to? A major part of my role as a student was to contribute. It wasn’t a negotiable point. I had to enroll in seminar-style classes of six to twelve people, where the entire purpose was to exchange ideas with fellow scholars, and I could still astonishingly maintain awkward silence for a whole semester. It was superhuman, this trait. You go through mental exercises where you tell yourself, “Okay, if I just pre-commit and force myself to say one thing—one thing, man—one fucking thing, no matter how insipid—it will be so much better than saying nothing for a whole hour.” But the brain can’t break through. No matter how rationally it can compute, no matter how relaxed it can be around the right people, it is stuck in an unyielding paralysis. I needed the mercy available to me in high school. And when there was no mercy, I stopped attending class altogether.

One of the lowest points for me was walking into my econometrics final, having attended only the first lecture. A chasm had formed between my twenty-year-old self and the annoyingly diligent pupil I’d been in high school. And it’s not like the course required extensive discussion. I had just lost the ability to engage; asking for help with a problem set or with life was just another situation I couldn’t face. Harvard has a legion of advisers, proctors, prefects, resident tutors, concentration tutors, house masters—and I didn’t know how to use any of them. I sat there in ignominy as a few people from my other courses caught me sitting for the Ec 1126 exam and realized what I had done. I know that the blind final exam is not an uncommon scenario in the American university, but the explanation is usually youthful flippancy and not a state of arrested social development.

But the most profound moments of learning came from the culmination of it all, at graduation. I went to Cabot’s dining hall one last time for breakfast before the university-wide exercises in the Yard. Because the final day was tightly scheduled, everyone was eating around the same time, and the meal became the equivalent of a dreaded 7:30 dinner for me: no choice but to sit alone, surrounded by throngs of people in revelry. This was my cohort; these were my peers. Yet after years together, no one knew who I was. How is it possible that things could have even transpired, unfolded in such a way? Here was the Cabot class of ’07, of which I was part, to which I belonged. And I couldn’t share in the celebration. I couldn’t share in the world, in a formative part of young life that had just been lived.

After the mimosas, as my stranger housemates and my alien self walked from the Quad in cap and gown, with fellow students striding alongside from all the university’s schools, descending on the Tercentenary Theatre; as the euphony of the ceremony in Memorial Church burst through the air, enveloping a very confused and jaded mind; as I listened to the speakers in the Yard fete our class with the encouraging words you’ve come to expect from a commencement, I was suddenly filled with a new sentiment. I actually believed in all of it. I was moved. I felt the centuries of history around me. I felt the multitude of lives in happy transition.

At the main ceremony, each school had an oversize prop to raise whenever it was recognized. The School of Dental Medicine, for example, held up an enormous toothpaste tube and toothbrush and cheered when their degrees were conferred. I thought that was funny. And in the yearly seating rotation of the undergraduate houses, Cabot happened to be in the very front spot of the Yard for the 356th commencement. I cheered with alacrity and vigor when it was the undergraduate College’s turn. I hadn’t yelled like that since watching Texas high school football. I was so fortunate to have lived in this place. It was an opportunity that few people have. And I’ve spent the last six years trying to grapple with the depth of what I squandered.

I took a free (i.e., unofficial) version of the Myers–Briggs personality test a few years ago. It’s odd to map the inscrutable complexity of human behavior onto a set with 16 elements, but as with any model, the simplifications can reveal patterns that may have been shrouded when looking at the systemic whole. If anything, as I took this test in a business context at my former job, I grew more aware of how people with divergent personalities have to work actively to understand each other. My teaching fellow who praised me for the things I did well and admonished me to be confident, above all, was in tune with this practice.

My introversion and social anxiety are probably more nuanced than I’ve made them out to be. In fact, I get along quite well with many people. And I’ve been in a relationship for more than 11 years with the one person who truly understands me. There are some people in my life for whom this narrative would be a startling surprise, and there are some people whose picture of me will finally be complete.

Introversion is a wide-ranging subject that I’ve seen addressed through the lens of psychological phenomena (“sensory-processing sensitivity,” a related concept—see Elaine Aron’s research) and in works for popular audiences (the recent Quiet by Susan Cain). The labels of “introverted,” “sensitive,” and “quiet” carry such a stigma in our culture, but many of us introverts do have a deep yearning to make meaningful connections with others. I’ve also read related research by John Cacioppo, a University of Chicago professor who studies social neuroscience and has examined the adverse effects of loneliness on general health.

I’ve felt that firsthand. I’d thought I wanted to avoid people, but the liberating anonymity that I formerly valued ultimately became confinement. I was full of spleen and sadness. My academic record was stained beyond what any competitive graduate program could tolerate. I ended up entering a recession-era job market with zero skills on how to meet people, to form partnerships, to negotiate, to stand up when people are being pieces of shit, to advocate for myself. The years of college and the years of rebuilding form a dark part of my life that I still don’t really comprehend, with which I’m still not fully at peace.

I saw a therapist this summer who helped me rationalize my newfound tendency to over-share my life. My instinct now is to tell people about everything. He tried to explain it by telling me, “You have a rich inner life, and you want other people to see it, and experience it, too.” For me, the introvert’s dilemma is this: that my inner life must be developed and nourished—it leads to self-awareness, an understanding of the world, emotional repair, equanimity; but also that the evolutionary need to cleave to others for survival compels me to get out there, to rejoice in the companionship and solace and love that friends surely provide. They are not easy desires to reconcile. Whereas Thoreau wrote, “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude,” I would just make an addendum that Solitude personified is one of many friends I want and need to have.

I’ve always loved belting out the end of a song called “The Bends” by Radiohead. The anthemic music originally attracted me as a teenager, but its lyrics grew much more relevant as the years went on. Now the simple words, distilling their complicated emotions, have become a part of me entirely. Thom Yorke sings, “I wanna live, breathe / I wanna be part of the human race.”