Are you an introvert or an extrovert? For most of my life I’ve been an introvert, by which I mean crowds drain my energy instead of feeding it. An extrovert walks out of a crowded room recharged. I walk out empty. For years I preferred my own space, my apartment, writing, hobbies, reading, movies. I wasn’t afraid of the outside world. I simply preferred my own. I skipped the parties in high school and college and avoided work events whenever I could. I never understood how extroverts could be so social.
How grief pushed me deeper into introversion
Within a year of getting married, my wife’s asthma took hold. She wouldn’t stop smoking, developed COPD, and eventually needed daily IV treatments to stay alive. Caring for her while holding down a demanding job pushed me hard into isolation. Twelve and a half years into our marriage, she passed away, and her death drove me deeper still, into a painful shyness I’d never known before. I’d folded almost entirely inward.
How a camera pulled me back out
I decided to fix it. After photographing every national and state park in the southwestern United States, I started going to renaissance festivals with my camera. I took thousands of pictures of people, over a thousand a day, with a personal record of 5,430 in a single day. Without quite planning it, I began using the camera as a way to talk to people. I could face a camera when I couldn’t yet face a person, and the camera became the bridge between me and everyone else.
The renaissance faire community accepted me as one of their own. That was exactly what I needed. I started photographing the belly dancers and, before long, became one of the best-known belly dance photographers in Southern California, shooting more than twelve hundred shows and events. What does that have to do with becoming a writer and ghostwriter? More than it seems. Composing a scene through a camera taught me to compose scenes in writing.
I learned about foreground and background, and about the small details that make or break an image, and every bit of it applies to writing both fiction and nonfiction. The camera did more than make me more social. It taught me to see.
Three ways to understand yourself beyond the labels
Introvert and extrovert are a useful starting frame, but real self-understanding goes deeper, and it takes more than sitting and thinking. First, practice curious self-reflection. Introspection matters, but how you do it matters more. Explore your own feelings and reactions with genuine curiosity instead of judgment, and over time your real inclinations and triggers come into view. Second, value outside insight but trust yourself. Friends and family can show you things you cannot see, but everyone filters through their own lens, so weigh their views against your own understanding.
You remain the truest judge of your own character. Third, step outside the familiar. Real self-awareness tends to arrive in unfamiliar terrain, a new hobby, a new place, a shift in routine, because those situations reveal how you adapt and what you like when the usual script is gone.
The labels give you a basic frame. Curiosity, honest feedback, and a willingness to try new things fill in the rest. I went from a shut-in with a camera I hid behind to someone who talks to strangers for a living, and the change started the moment I decided the label didn’t have to be permanent.