The Unapologetic Introvert

Whenever I meet someone who works from home, I immediately become very jealous. For many reasons, I know I'd like to do so myself again one day (I was fortunate to own a business when I was younger, and I absolutely loved working from home). Yesterday I came across an excellent article that expresses much of how I feel about the subject and about being an introvert in general. It's about escaping the workplace in order to more easily thrive as an introvert, and I wish I could share the entire thing. Instead, here's how it begins:

Sometimes people ask why I work from home. Well, if you must know, I work from home to avoid a lot of things: the average American commute time of 26 minutes, obnoxious open-plan workspaces that encourage nothing but the sale of noise-cancelling headphones to skyrocket, and the ever-enduring attitude that the ideal worker is the one who puts in the most face time, not the one who is most productive. But most importantly, I work from home to avoid something very painful: the need to be extroverted.

Excerpt from an article on Salon.com,
The unapologetic introvert: I had to leave the U.S. to stop pretending to be an extrovert
By Chantal Panozzo

 

Noticeable

We live in a loud world, and silence is easy to spot. The quiet ones are anomalies. Exhibiting such unobtrusiveness doesn't always feel as harmless as it should. Ironically, we call attention to ourselves by trying not to. The best way not to be noticed, it seems, is to be noticed just enough. We learn to be social so that nobody will notice how unsocial we are. We find ways to get attention on our terms rather than when it's unwanted. Intentionally or not, we find creative ways to be ourselves.