Walkers Don't Talk, or why this blog is so hard to spell

As I've mentioned before, this blog is largely about what happens when I get a sandwich. Most of these posts started out as lunch break scribbles, and in fact, the whole blog started because I went out one day to get a sandwich.

As I sat alone in the food court, enjoying my spicy Chick-fil-a chicken sandwich, I overheard a young woman describing all the colleagues she didn’t like. And I heard her say about one woman, “She’s not a bad person, she just has no personality.”

I KNOW, RIGHT?!?!?! If a person is quiet, or withdrawn, or hard to get to know or figure out, it’s a sure sign that person is soulless and empty on the inside.

I know because I am one of those people. I’m pretty much a zombie. I see it in my dead, dark eyes when I look in the mirror. Right now I hear the echo in my mindless skull.

We all know Walkers don't talk. The Walking Dead, Sunday nights on AMC.

I’m not a bad person. I’m just impossible to like.

There is a word for people like me, the real-life "walkers" who shamble about in your midst with their creepy blank stares and obvious lack of charisma. The word is "introverts."

Introverts are widely believed to have no personality. Plenty of people have said that about me, I’m sure. Now, you might expect me to say that introverts actually do have personality, in spite of popular opinion, but I won’t say that. Because I don’t know what a personality is.

Food Court Girl likes to gossip about coworkers. Is that personality? Comedian Guy does nothing but tease you all the time. Is that personality? Oversharing Man likes to talk about his traumatic childhood on first meeting you. Team Mom isn’t your mom but likes to talk like she is. Sweetest Lady in the World will send flowers if you’re in the hospital and OMG guys did you see the last episode of Lost???

I know, Lost was a long time ago, but you get my point.

"Do you have, like, any personality at all?"

"Do you have a brain at all?... And can I eat it?"

Personality is a bit like soul, heart or mind – we are all pretty sure we have one, but when pressured to describe it, we can’t. At all. But we sure can presume things about other people.

I love conspiracy theories involving the paranormal. Lady Gaga is my hero. I’m a passionate, liberal feminist. I’m a good listener, compassionate and patient with people. And I think, if there is such a thing as a personality, I must have one. But not much of it will shine among the cubicles - certainly not enough to inspire you to invite me out to get a sandwich.

Not everyone hates introverts. Some people pity us for the sad state of personal repression that is our every waking moment. Introverts respond to this pity with a blank stare, or perhaps an uncomfortable grin or a slightly raised eyebrow.

"Poor walkers. They have a soul, they're just afraid to
show it, because they think they'll be judged."

See, for non-introverts (we introverts call them "extraverts," they call themselves "normal people") talking is like a roiling white-water river of unobstructed self expression that surges robustly from their brain and gushes from their vocal cords. For introverts, talking is more like Dr. Livingstone trying to make his way through the whole African jungle with just a machete. We have to hack through a dense forest of thoughts and a thick undergrowth of feelings just to say a few words. No wonder we look lost.

When two introverts discover a common interest,
they may ask, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"

For extraverts, that must sound outrageously laborious and pointless, considering you could just be more river-y and surge right over those trees like the Hoover Dam just collapsed. But for introverts, the way extraverts think is chaotic and disorganized, resulting in sweeping oversights and thoughtlessly offensive remarks. Believe me, for every introvert that has been thought boring, an extravert has been thought tasteless.

I'm disgusting? Pardon me, sir, but your manners are disgusting.

I'm not afraid to be myself. In fact, I quite enjoy myself. But for me and other introverts, talking isn't the best (and certainly isn't the only) way to enjoy ourselves. So I started this blog - a place for me to enjoy being me in ways that are more natural for me, and a place where other introverts might enjoy hearing from one of their kind, on anything that strikes her fancy. This blog is a way for me to connect more authentically with other people, a way for me to "put myself out there" to be known by people, since talking just doesn't typically do it for me.

Excuse me. I mean, since walkers don't talk.

The Myers-Briggs Personality Indicator, which operates on the premise that personalities are a thing and everyone has one, identifies me as an INFJ - Introverted, intuitive, feeling, judging. (Each of these descriptors has an opposite - extraverted, sensing, thinking, perceiving - resulting in 16 different combinations.) For me, the introverted and intuitive categories are the most pronounced.

"We are Katherine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers,
and we posit that personality is a thing."

The "intuitive" piece means I'm interested in what's abstract and theoretical, making me even less fun at parties. I see things more as patterns than unique experiences, and I put a lot of faith in those patterns. I'm more interested in what something signifies than it what it actually accomplishes. Ultimately it will accomplish what it signifies - I know this because that is the pattern. See?

Your plan is going to fail miserably. But you won't
die, because you never do.

And so, adding the intuitive to the introverted moves me further and further away from "normal" in a culture that defines positive, outspoken, go-getters as attractive. These people are ambitious, fun-loving, and have "good people skills." People who want to stop you in the middle of your plan, write an essay about that plan's implications, and then relax by Facebooking their friends about critical essays regarding Lady Gaga are considered negative, nit-picking and antisocial. Also just weird.

Well, I'm not interested in proving my value to anyone. I've spent my life smiling like a maniac to prove that I'm not brooding or scared, which is what people assume when I don't talk. But here at Introverted Intuitive, I'm just being my introverted intuitive self. And I'm not ashamed to say, my brain trumps the real world every time.

Did someone say brains?

No but seriously, y'all

Exciting news, readers! It turns out my immediate family are not the only ones reading this blog. My extended family is reading it, too! (Hi, guys!!)

So a few weeks ago my cousin mentioned having read my last post, Nonprofit Girl Gets a Sandwich, in which I chronicled two encounters between myself, the heroic Nonprofit Girl, and two villians, Clipboard Dude and Creepy Stranger Dude. My cousin asked me if I really find myself getting "accosted" much on the streets of Publicville.

What I wanted to say was, "Accosted? Me? No, of COURSE not!! Everything is fine. Everything is awesome, and the world is awesome, and I'm awesome, and the dudes on the street are awesome, and THERE IS NO BAD LEFT IN THE WORLD and my parents should not worry about me, and I should not worry about me, because bad things do not happen anymore, and I just cannot wait to jump out and show my face to the world every morning!!!!!!!!!"

THERE IS NO BAD LEFT IN THE WORLD!!!

Secret's out, I guess. I like to (read: have a neurotic compulsion to) present the most cheerful disposition I can muster when I'm in situations where I have to speak words. Damn, I'm not a very genuine person, am I?

But also, on the subject of being accosted on the streets of Publicville, (I know, back to the point, already!) I don't want to make a big deal about my experiences because they are really not that bad.

Right? They are not that bad. Looking at a list of types of street harrassment, I've never gotten "sexually explicit comments," "vulgar gestures," "groping," or been the "target of public masturbation" (Oh man. Let's pretend we didn't read that last one.). I haven't been "followed" or had my "path blocked" since high school, and I'm pretty sure I'm not going back there.

So, no. I don't get accosted much on the streets of Publicville. The occasional "leering," "whistling," and "sexist comments" doesn't really justify complaining, in the scheme of things.

It makes me feel like I am staring straight into a black hole, and it gives me that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, like the mask of civility is as thin as tissue paper and in fact underneath it the world is not awesome but thoroughly awful. But that's just my sensitive mind. In reality, it's not that bad.

That's what I told myself. But on the same day I was telling myself it's not that bad, Soraya Chemaly was posting an article to HuffPost Women to validate my feelings, the feelings I was trying to invalidate.

So, my last post was humorous, but if you'll allow, I'd like to take this opportunity to put forth a very sincere "no but seriously, y'all." Soraya is right:

Street harassment is a serious issue because it's the most visible symptom of a society that uses fear to control more than half of the population ... Anywhere between 80 percent and 98 percent of women surveyed report persistent, aggressive street harassment ... 69 percent of women surveyed chose not to make eye contact for fear of harassment. When 69 percent of women regularly are thinking about avoiding eye contact, it's a serious problem.

Eye contact is an important component of freedom, civility and equality. Even my 14-year-old instinctively knows that. Her rule to assess risk is whether or not she can "look him in the eye, freely, and say thank you the way I would to a woman." ... Street harassment is the tip of a very big iceberg. As Emily May, a founder of the end harassment movement Hollaback, describes it, public harassment is a gateway behavior to domestic violence and rape. If a man feels entitled in public, what does he do in private?

...  

Street harassment is NOT about sex. It's about power. It's subtle and pervasive social control. It says to girls and women, "you can never be sure you are safe out here and I can control where you go, when you walk, whether or not you smile, what you wear and how you feel." It's not flattering. It's not fun. We aren't "asking for it." The normative public intimidation of women is a debilitating blight on equality.

(Emphasis mine)

Damn straight the normative public intimidation of women is a debilitating blight on equality. Shame on anyone who says it isn't - I will never downplay it again. I don't want to hear that I'm "purdy" any more than I want to hear that I'm ugly, because saying it insists your opinion should have some value to me. It declares that you are the Judger and I am the Judged. It says, "You didn't think you were put on this earth just to go about your own business, did you?"

My life is not a pageant, it is my life. When a stranger "compliments" me, what he is really saying is, at worst, "I'd fuck you," or at best, "You are here for my entertainment." That is objectifying (read: soul-stripping), intimidating and thoroughly malicious. Yeah, sure, a lot of the people who engage in these activities don't realize the sick ideologies they are acting out of, or the harmful consequences of their behavior. Tough shit. That doesn't change anything.

See, the thing about objects is, they are not alive. And that's kind of a big deal.

Well, now that I've embraced my anger and shared it with all you lovely people, the time has come at the end of the blog post where I am supposed to posit some "actions" you can take to combat the massive, worldwide, institutionalized ideology of women's oppression. Okay, let me see what I can come up with.

Ladies. You have probably been told you were overreacting every time you ever got angry. You were taught to be grateful for every attention that was paid to you, much of which, from the time you were an infant, was based on "how pretty you look!" and "how cute that dress is!" But now we have to recognize how those messages have taught us to distrust ourselves and become blind to our own realities.

Let's listen to ourselves, and listen to each other. Honor your anger. And pass it on. And you know what's more? Let's talk to our husbands and boyfriends about our anger. They should be our allies.

Don't set guys' beds on fire. Do make art about setting guys' beds on fire.

Guys. I'm going to assume, for argument's sake, that you are not seething with rage toward me right now, though what I've seen from commenters on other feminists' articles would suggest otherwise. I hope you will be aware of what goes on around you, even though you don't have to be, and don't assume certain things are not happening because you never noticed. I assume none of my readers are street harassers, so I will just say, even with your female friends, colleagues or relatives you really shouldn't compliment their appearance at all (your wife or girlfriend excluded). Because your opinion is irrelevent, right? Right. But mainly, please, just don't forget.

And of course, the kids. Kids today need to learn about the big bad F-word: feminism. They'll probably learn something about it in college, but widespread harassment of girls starts in middle school or earlier and becomes rampant in high school. We cannot wait until college to teach kids about feminism -  56 percent of girls and 40 percent of boys will have already been harassed and intimidated at school, and many of them will have already harassed and intimidated their peers.

I am following Stop Street Harassment and Hollaback on Facebook, to help me remember, and to help spread awareness and to keep an eye on their movements in case any opportunities come up that I might want to get involved in. That's the least I can do for myself and for my hurting society.

I believe I should be free to smile on the street without suffering unwanted advances. I believe I should be free not to smile when I'm displeased, and so should you. Shouldn't it go without saying?