Introverts Go Wild
By: David Price
Tags: France, Artist, Culture, Introvert, Extravert

Image by Slabs Fokk

I had no idea that life was going to be this political. It is only belatedly that I have realized that just being myself is a political act. I am not talking about the politics of the Left and the Right, but the politics of living in the so-called ‘normal’ official world, whilst the soul that has its own peculiar concerns, demands and necessities as Carl Jung said. The politics of what the world wants from us and what the soul wants. Between our familiar world and the political situations we find ourselves in every day when we start living life as an adventure lived for the sake of the soul.

Sometimes I think writing is where introverts go wild(and run free like an animal in the wild untamed forest of their own imaginal life). That is where they tap into their teeming, hidden, private, unofficial life and then let themselves loose (like the woman that wrote that cookbook ‘The Enchanted Broccoli Forest’, that was an introvert going wild, and ‘Women who run with the Wolves’ that was probably another introvert going wild). Anyway, I would never say this in public, and I can’t remember Jung ever saying it, but sometimes I think that extroverts are different and often think that becoming a TV Games Show host is really wild.🙂 — Jon Wilson

When I was a child I felt inferior to extroverts. I thought they had a mysterious — and much better — grasp on everything to do with living in the world than I did. As I grew up, I harbored a sense that I wasn’t quite how I should be, that I needed to imitate the extroverts because they knew how to negotiate society. But the older I got the more introverted I became and the more irritated by extroverts I was. Intelligent extroverts often surprised me with insights but they almost always exasperated me with their noisy ways. They never seemed to shut up. They couldn’t stand silence. Strangely enough, being alone was torture to them. They didn’t seem to like their own company.

I couldn’t wait to get away fast enough.

I went through a long period when I didn’t know any extroverts. I took an almost adversarial stance against the extroverted culture I grew up in. I grew away from it in a lot of ways. I never did reconcile to it. I seem to be on a path ever deeper into the inner realm. Getting out from under the extroverted cloud with its games and hubbub wasn’t easy and it’s not even complete yet because the world is ever with us, as they say.

The mindset of the society I grew up in was impossible for me to understand or even imitate, in the end. It came down to how much I could stand going against myself. The effort to adapt myself to my native culture just set up a conflict in myself. I only became aligned with my basic nature when I went abroad. French culture is more contained, more, well, introverted. It has a noisy extraverted side, but it’s less obvious than the environment I grew up in.

There’s talk of a global cultural switch from masculine to feminine now, and I hope to live to see it. We all could use a more feeling oriented, aesthetically attuned and inner directed way of living after these many centuries of paternalistic dominance. Masculine values have brought the world to the brink.

Who better equipped to save the world than the women and the introverts?