The thing I find most difficult about introversion is being aware of such a thing. I would make a bet that there are more introverts aware of their introversion than there are extroverts aware of their extroversion. Why would I dare to make such a bet? Let me ask you this second question: Have you ever heard an extrovert having to explain, rationalize, or defend his own personality? Probably not because extroversion is the normal personality. It’s the expected behavior from most people. It’s the encouraged behavior. And it’s the behavior society rewards most.
So clearly there are many people who don’t know what introversion is exactly. That’s because introverts are the minority. When extroverted people bump with introverts they just can’t deal with it. They are in awe and surprised that you can be comfortably silent for hours. It’s odd to them, because technically, it is odd. The minority is not normal to the majority. This curiosity by the extrovert leads to a confrontation. Well, at least from the point of view of the introverted, the questioning of your personality feels that way. They tag you as shy, immature, arrogant, weird, geek, nerd, etc.
This will happen through out an introverts’ life every time he meets new people. And because it happens so much, it’s inevitable ending up discovering that there’s such a thing called introversion. But this is the tricky part: it’s really freaking hard to prove your abnormalcy as normal. To others and to yourself. Pulling out the introversion card to others seem like an excuse. A cop-out. You can never be truly objective about yourself. You can’t be your own psychologist. It doesn’t even matter what personality you have; explaining why you are they way you are is just introspective masturbation. Kind of like this post.
I’m making it sound more dramatic than it really it is. I don’t constantly feel abnormal and insecure. I’m perceptive and empathic. I’m shy but it’s nothing extreme. I’m as shy as most people. While sometimes I feel like Adam Sandler in Punch Drunk Love, I have an average and functioning social life. Of course, when your younger it’s tougher dealing with introversion and it can lead to more negative things like depression. But as you get older you learn to deal with it. The trick is knowing when to pull out that introversion card. Sometimes is best not to because it will make things worse. My rule of thumb is if you really value the friendship or the potential friendship, try as much as you can to be understood.
According to this article, there are as many introverts as extraverts. While I’m inclined to believe that statistic isn’t entirely correct, I don’t think it’s that far off the mark. Introversion/extraversion is a spectrum, and if you put down a line in the middle, I’m sure you’ll find a significant part of the population on the more introverted end of the spectrum. We don’t notice because of selection bias: the loudest are most easily heard, tautologically, and so we notice those whom we’d be expected to notice (those making themselves heard, i.e., extraverts) while those we don’t notice are those we wouldn’t expect to notice (the quiet ones).
You’re right that the normative behavior, the behavior that is expected and promoted by society, is extraverted behavior. But I wouldn’t concede that introversion is “odd”. That would be like saying homosexuality is odd. Homosexuality isn’t odd, not even “technically odd”. It’s not unusual. In this day and age, it’s odd to regard it as odd. I’m sure there are as many, if not more introverts than there are homosexuals, and I don’t think we should regard either as unusual, odd, strange, weird, non-normal, etc. I understand that you use the word odd in the way it would be odd to meet a guy who could shoot milk out of his eyes or benchpress 300 kg: as something not necessarily wrong or creepy, but certainly out of the ordinary. And I don’t really see introversion as anything unusual.
Thanks for pointing to that article. I’ve always believed that statistically, the introverted personality is a low percentage of the population, but intuitively I’ve always felt that wasn’t true. Like you mentioned, there’s more introverts around that go unnoticed probably because they’re not embracing it as their sole identity and live in a society that’s aware of it.