MARCH
Your extroversion is an endangered species, Virgo; and just like every endangered species, only a percentage of those aware of the impending extinction are actively engaged in its prevention. Sure, you recognize that human connection is vital, just as the general population acknowledges that a world devoid of the Yangtze Finless Porpoise is no world at all; but idle agreement on these matters won’t stop you from choosing to watch Alaskan Women Looking for Love alone on a Saturday night instead of enjoying the vibrant city you pay so much to live inside, and it certainly won’t prevent overfishing—or whatever is hurting those poor little porpoises.
You’ve felt your extroversion fading—the Yangtze Finless Porpoise population dwindling—for a while now, but this month you’ll retake the Myers Briggs personality test after a ten year hiatus and realize the shifts in your being have been more seismic than you previously believed. You used to be 51% extroverted and 49% introverted according to Myers Briggs, but this month you’ll clock in at 32% extroverted and 68% introverted.
At the conclusion of the test, little cartoon graphics lay out the meaning of each letter in your personality. These geometric computer characters tell you that “Introverted individuals tend to prefer fewer, yet deep and meaningful, social interactions.” BINGO, you’ll think and probably say due to your possession of all the incorrect forms of self-consciousness. You finally see a sophisticated expression of your truest feelings: the only socializing you enjoy is consuming one meal with one friend.
Prior to the earth shattering results of your online personality quiz, you’ll catch up with a friend you haven’t seen in years over lunch. For some reason you find yourself explaining to him that you prefer one-on-one hangs as opposed to being a part of the slippery, oft odious “friend group.” He’ll seem surprised by this and ask you if you’d always been this way. You’ll tell him that Yes, you’ve always been exactly this way—no changes to see here! Only when the Myers Briggs cartoon breaks down your psychology into bite size portions do you see that your friend was right—you definitely have not always been this way.
It seems you’ve been folding in on yourself since the last time you had lunch with this friend, to whom your change in socializing preferences seem so stark. Folding isn’t always bad, Virgo—shirts, pants, etc—but when a human woman is the one being folded it’s important to interrogate the cause to determine if it’s for sad, reversible reasons or due to natural, personal evolution. Which is how March will become your month of imprecise but well-intentioned self reflection.
Your metamorphosis into an introvert is perhaps most notable in your relationship to performance, so you begin your investigation there. Performing was once a major part of your life, but is now mostly absent.
In a misguided quest for self knowledge you’ll do what you do every few years when you’re confused about who you are: you sign up for an improv class. You imagine that this class will put you back in touch with a previous version of yourself enough to answer your central question: was your transition to introversion inevitable or in the response to something sinister?
The class is—as it always is—not the answer to any of your problems. You quickly abandon it and hold tightly to the concept of sunk cost in order to comfort yourself about the several hundred dollars this lesson cost you.
Your relationship to performance has also changed as an audience member. Instead of simply enjoying performances, you’ve reached an era where the sight of women sharing her talents on stage brings you to tears. In fact, bearing witness to women shining will bring you to tears three times in one week.
The tears at two of the three performances can be explained fairly easily. One was a band you’ve long wanted to see live, and the other was a good friend whose music you adore. Getting moved to tears at these shows is no great mystery, Virgo. The third episode of tearful enjoyment at a young woman’s performance will, however, come as far more of a shock.
You didn't know it when the show started, but as the setlist progressed you realized you’d met the lead singer at a party once. When you met, she mentioned that she grew up on the west coast. You, a person from the west coast, asked from where on the west coast she hailed, to which she responded, Vegas. This flabbergasted you. Since there are only three states on the west coast, you didn’t think it was possible to be confused about which states were among them. Unlike the east coast, which houses anywhere from 5–22 states—there’s really no way to know for sure.
It’s important to note here: Virgo doesn’t particularly like the west coast. Usually when she describes someone as “very west coast” she means it as a snide, vague insult. Your shock didn’t come from a flag toting pride in your homeland (they can keep their breweries and maladjusted social skills, in her opinion), so much as a bone deep amazement that anyone would think of Nevada as being located on the west coast. It’s like when you and your husband discovered he has been taught that the Americas were one continent, and you were taught that they were broken up into North and South.
As a citizen of the beyond, I cannot be condemned as a coastal elitist, so I hope we can accept it as purely factual when I say that Vegas is not on the west coast, or any coast at all.
Since you’d already been moved to tear-brimming by this performance, you’ll try remembering this conversation as a way to emotionally sober yourself. After all, crying frequently doesn’t preclude one from embarrassment. Alas, even this exercise doesn’t prevent you from connecting with her work.
Safe in the comfort of home, once the final tears have fallen for the month, you’ll find yourself confused about the data you’ve collected. Are you softer, more emotionally accessible, more moved by the art you ingest than you once were? After all, you used to condemn all novels as “condescending,” but now gobble them up with a ferocity that reveals an enthusiastic but ominous scarcity mindset.
Is this what introversion is? Wishing to quietly enjoy art with intermittent weeping and getting dinner once a week with someone you love? Should you mourn your past extroversion, as you would the plight of Yangtze Finless Porpoise? Should you try to summon your extroversion outside the hallowed halls of an improv rehearsal space?
Instead of journaling about your True Nature or calling a close friend for guidance, you’ll start researching MFA programs. I guess it’s better than a red convertible, but there is still something pretty identity crisis-y about your abrupt interest in higher education. I guess this is something you’ll work out with your eventual workshop group.
For now, I suggest accepting a certain degree of constant change in your nature. You aren’t as energetic as you were as a toddler, yet you know enough not to let that send you into an existential panic. Why is this any different?
I don’t like to set too many hard and fast rules, Virgo, but I am going to have to draw a line in the sand here: I forbid you from taking any more personality tests—you are far too malleable to fairly interpret their results.