There's a bittersweet irony in flipping through my high school yearbook. My face often appears there, smiling amidst groups of friends, a seemingly popular and approachable figure. In university, in the anthropology department, it was the same story: a "hello" to everyone in the hallways, and most faces would turn, familiar. This propensity for extroversion, this ease in connecting superficially, was long a part of my identity.
Yet, beneath this sociable facade, another tendency, deeper and more persistent, pulled towards the shadows: introversion. For a long time, I wondered if this need for solitude was just a disguised form of fear, an apprehension of social interactions. But with time, another hypothesis emerged: what if this desire to be alone, solitary, was simply an authentic expression of who I am?
The more I embrace this need for space, the more whole I feel. The fewer people I see, especially in a social context, the better I am. A calm settles in, an inner centering consolidates, and the exhaustion, that dull fatigue that followed crowds, fades away. It's as if, insidiously, a change had occurred within me, a slow metamorphosis towards introversion.
A personal event acted as a powerful catalyst in this evolution: the breakup with my child's mother. While she hastened to seek refuge in a new relationship, I felt a growing disinterest in any form of romantic commitment. This experience may have exacerbated a latent feeling: a certain distance from the motivations I perceive in others, an echo of that "stupidity" and those "false motivations" that seem so prevalent to me. Ambition, for example, this relentless pursuit that society values so much, seems to me, in the light of certain ancient wisdoms, an insidious poison. And the gap between this deep conviction and most people's worldview only reinforces my desire for withdrawal.
Today, my energy is precious, a dropper I choose to dedicate to those who truly matter: my son, my family, a few rare close friends. The lack of others is rare, and when it manifests, it is surprisingly easy to fill. The truth is, in the chosen silence of solitude, I find myself. The agitation of the outside world, once a stage where I played a role with a certain ease, has become background noise that I prefer to fade out. This distance is not a rejection, but rather a redefinition of my needs, an acceptance of the person I have become, in the strange familiarity of my own company.