Introversion – Hugh's Blog

Introversion at conferences

I used to spend a fair amount of my life at conferences. Back when I was regularly asked to speak or, more often, lead breakout sessions, I would be at maybe ten of these things a year.

But then I quit speaking about faith and homelessness and I moved to a new city and then COVID happened and suddenly it had been five years since I had been to much of anything like the conference I am at this week, put on by my denomination, Mennonite Church USA.

I don’t know how many people are here – they come and go, and other than the plenary sessions, you never see everyone at once, but maybe a few thousand?

Over the years, I adopted a series of practices to keep me sane at events like this. Mostly they were adopted in self defense, and were not planned. But this week I realized now they are muscle memory.

Most things like this love to offer communal meals, where you are expected to sit next to absolute strangers. I will only do one of those during the conference. If I need to eat, I try to latch onto someone I know, so at least the energy expenditure is low.
I always stay at the conference hotel, if it’s at all feasible. Being able to hide in your hotel room when you have 20 minutes of downtime is priceless.
I try to schedule one on one meals with people I want to talk to, or catch up with. It takes much less energy to have a one on one coffee or meal than it does to chat with a bunch of folks.
Grab snacks like individual yogurts, those water bottle juice powders, and some trail mix, and keep them in your room for when you need topping up. This also gives you an excuse to go back your room.
I accept I won’t go to everything I could. I have no FOMO.
I run on my home time zone – now Central Time. I’m currently in Eastern Time, but I’m waking up and going to bed based on CST. If the trip is less than a week, I just refuse to adjust.
Take advantage of serendipity. Tonight, my supper meeting cancelled, so I skipped the evening session and went to CookOut and had a strawberry milkshake and a chilidog for supper. Only God can judge me.

Mennonite on the move.

I’m in Greensboro, NC for the rest of the week for the bi-annual Mennonite Church USA convention, and I always feel a bit weird at things like this. I love my denomination, and I love what they stand for at their best. But it’s also always a bit surreal.

There are only three MC USA churches in my state. Our conference, the Gulf States Conference, is the smallest. It’s a pretty lonely place to be Mennonite, to tell you the truth. In the US, Mennonites are found in quantity in the Midwest and Northeast. And there are relatively none in the Southeast, especially the deep south. And I’m unapologetically Queer-affirming and am a Christian Humanist, and honestly, the denomination hasn’t always known what to do with somebody like me.

And I’m an introvert, and in general, I don’t think introverts go to conferences and conventions.

But here I am. My role as pastor at Open Door Mennonite Church doesn’t require me to go, but it’s good if I can. So yesterday I drove 11 and a half hours to get here, and arrived around 7 last night. After checking in, I went to the exhibit hall and ran into a dozen or more folks I know from around the country, and a few more who only know me from social media.

So today I shall fortify myself with coffee and sit in sessions and put my extrovert face on and hang out with my folks. And then tomorrow, get up and do it again.

I’m tired.

I’m whipped.

My job at the church has me running hard both last week and this week, and there is lots of detail work involved, and much extroversion involved, and while I love so much about my work there, neither of those two things are on the list. I swear I have spoken more in the last two weeks than I have in the last six months. It is at times like this that I am certain I am a social introvert.

And in the last three months or so, five people I care about have died – some from Covid and some from cancer, but regardless, they are still dead.

And then there is the lunacy that is the current Supreme Court, as we watch decades of civil rights work get rolled back. For folks like me – white, straight, Christian, male – we’re as safe as houses. But queer folk, women, people of color, and people of other faiths are considerably less safe than they were six weeks ago. But it shouldn’t have to affect you for it to matter to you.

And then there is the “mass shooting of the week” – most recently in Highland Park, Illinois. When Columbine happened, we were in shock for weeks. Now I can’t even keep up with which one is the most recent one.

It’s all too much.

As an introvert, I often take weeks to formulate my thoughts on something. I will process it in my head, turn it this way and that, argue for and against it, and then, having made up my mind, will want to write about it. But we will have had three new things to be outraged about by then. The internet is an outrage machine – it both generates it and rewards it – and I have no desire to participate in that game.

So, this is just a reminder that I don’t blog about current events. You shouldn’t mistake my silence on things for lack of care or concern – rather it’s that I only have so much energy, and I want to use my voice in places where those words are useful. We do not need my outrage – there is already plenty to go around. If you need me to tell you why you should be upset, you clearly are not paying attention.

I am a huge believer in the idea of modeling the world we wish to see, and I want to live in a world that rewards thoughtful writing, and intentional rest, and that recognizes that by telling the truth about our fears and struggles, we can reduce the amount of shame in the world.

So that’s what I try to model here. So, there will be no hot takes. No hashtags. No outrage. I probably won’t write anything that will go viral. I’ve done all that. It’s a lot like cheap sex – it feels good while it’s happening, but you won’t like yourself afterward. And like cheap sex, it’s hard to do it while caring about the other people involved. Or, honestly, yourself.

Managing energy

I have spent the last 15 years working in the so-called “helping professions”. People like nurses, doctors, pastors, social workers, teachers… that’s us – the helping professionals. And for helping professionals, the main resource we use in our work is our energy.

And to make things more complicated – I’m an introvert. That doesn’t mean that I’m shy, or I don’t like people. It just means I derive energy from solitude, and I expend energy when I engage people. In other words, people are expensive.

In helping circles, a lot of time is spent talking about self-care, and it has even slipped over into mainstream conversation. But all too often, self-care is equated with doing something enjoyable: A spa day. An afternoon at the movies. Soaking in a hot tub.

Those can all be fun, but the real task of self-care is energy preservation and repletion. If energy is your single most important resource, a primary job of self-care has to be protecting and replenishing that resource.

I know a surgeon, and the list of things he just won’t do is long because he simply cannot afford to hurt his hands. They are the means by which he earns his living, and that is too important to risk on something like mountain climbing.

Or another friend who is a bartender, and she makes her living on her feet. The money she spends on shoes and inserts and care for her feet gives me chills, and she too has a long list of things she won’t do, because it could hurt her feet and impact her ability to do her work.

I propose we should take energy management exactly that seriously.

That sounds simplistic and privileged, and it is. But something can be both simplistic and true: You have to manage your energy to be in this fight long-term. This sort of work – helping work – is an endurance sport – a marathon, not a sprint, and we will not get the better world of which we dream by working 14 hour days on the regular.

And privilege is both a noun and a verb, and while energy management is a privilege in the noun sense, it is also something we must privilege in the verb sense – we must privilege it, make it a priority, in the same way we make eating a priority.

A big part of how we do that involves listening to your body, and then building your life around what you learn. The most important knowledge is always self-knowledge.

Here is a personal example:

Because I know myself, I know my most creative time of the day is early morning, that my least productive time is after 3:00 PM, that I really need 7 hours of sleep to be my best, and that more than 8 hours of sleep will not help me and actually hurts me. Carbs are not my friend, and sugar makes me tired. Exercise of any sort helps me focus. Mingling among crowds is exhausting, but being on stage is life-giving.

None of that is supposition or opinion: Those are facts, gathered over a lifetime. And because I have committed my life to build a better world, I have to manage my energy, so I have, to the fullest extent possible, sought to build a life that prioritizes those facts and takes them into account.

So only easy meetings get scheduled for after 3:00 PM whenever possible. I wake up as early as I can, which means trying to get to bed as early as I can (A friend once told me that going to bed early is how adults sleep in, and I can’t agree more). If I eat sweets at all, it is only after I am done with work for the day. I am more likely to accept your invitation to be a speaker than I am to attend your party as a guest. And I take daily walks that range from 20 minutes to 2 hours, depending on the amount of time I have available.

And I’m not perfect at this, in any sort of way. But I have found that doing something excellently 80% of the time always gives me better results than doing something half-assed 100% of the time. The things we pay attention to are the things that get better.

I’m not saying that any of these things are things you should be doing, but they are things that work for me, and allow me to be fairly good at my work, despite being an ADHD riddled, introverted, depressed Chaos Muppet.

I am saying, though, that you should pay attention to your body and learn how your body responds to things, and then build a life that focuses on preserving and maintaining your energy.

What have you found helps you with managing your energy?

Introversion and energy management

I am an introvert. This shocks a lot of people who know me.

“You seem so outgoing!”

“You are so engaged when talking to people!”

“You do so well on the stage!”

Introversion isn’t a synonym for being shy, or socially awkward, or withdrawn. There are introvert stand-up comedians, introvert actors, and introvert party planners. No, introversion just means you get your energy from solitude, and you spend energy on public interaction. As opposed to extroverts, who derive energy from interaction and spend energy in solitude.

So, as an introvert, I can have a very public facing job. It just costs me more energy to do it than it would if I were an extrovert.

Think of it like this:

Like a lot of people who work in the so-called helping professions, I don’t make a lot of money. I mean, I make enough to support my family and to pay my bills, but we have to be careful with our spending. Extravagances are rare, and splurges are just that – a splurge.

So, for example, if I want to go out and eat steak at a steakhouse, I can afford to do it – occasionally. Like, maybe once a month, if I plan for it. But I couldn’t do it every day. I would quickly be bankrupt and overdrawn, unable to take care of my obligations.

And if that happened, the problem isn’t that steak is expensive, although it is pricey. And the problem wouldn’t be my income, although things are tight. The problem is that I didn’t properly manage my resources. Because steak is expensive, and I do have a finite amount of money.

And for introverts like me, people are expensive, and I have a finite amount of energy, and that energy is a resource I must manage.

For example: Tonight I am going to the birthday party of a friend’s son. He is turning 12, and there will be a cookout and a bonfire and lots of kids and basketball and toasted marshmallows. And it will be expensive for me, energy-wise. But the kid means a lot to me, and the friend means a lot to me, and so I’ve decided it will be worth it. The same way you might save up to treat a yourself to a nice bottle of wine for a special occasion.

But just like me deciding to eat steak at a fancy restaurant, I can’t just do it whenever I want to. I have to save up for it. I have to plan for it. I have to look ahead and budget my energy around it. I knew I had this on the calendar, so I didn’t plan any in-person meetings this afternoon, and I don’t have any planned until lunchtime tomorrow. I’m going to spend an hour or so before we go alone, reading, and when we get home, I will be exhausted, and will go to bed. But while I am at the party, I will see people, have fun, and the people I will interact with will think I am likeable and outgoing.

Because I am outgoing. And I will have fun at this party. It’s just expensive for me.

A further thing:

I recognize that the ability to arrange my schedule is a huge privilege, one that most people don’t enjoy. It has taken me until I am almost 50 years old to have this much control over my calendar, but it is something I have been fighting for my whole life. Once you know how you best work, then trying to make your life match up to that is a huge quality of life improvement, and very much worth fighting for.