7QT: In which I make a confession

1. Hi, my name's Jenny, and I'm an introvert. Cough.

2. If it weren't for the internet, I would go entire days without speaking to anyone outside my immediate family, save for my awkwardly friendly checker at Trader Joe's and the even more awkward interactions I occasionally sustain from my driveway with my neighbors.

3. So when you comment...are you ready for this? IT FILLS MY HEART WITH SO MUCH JOY. Because it's like virtual interaction minus the actual interaction part, y'all. But then...oh, then...the back log. The mounting pressure of having no way to respond to so many (no emails linked to names) or just simply not enough time in the day (kids, work, baby, back episodes of Parenthood on Amazon Prime. Priorities) to reply to every single one and then I get, like, panic-attacky in the dark of night, thinking back over all the lovely, thought provoking and insightful things that people have said and that I HAVE YET TO ACKNOWLEDGE. And I feel bad. Real bad. Because I'm a blogger...and we LIVE for comments. It's like a little kiss from the universe for the effort we put into over-sharing on the internet.

4. So I'm renewing my effort, here and now, to keep more on-top ish of the com box. But...but...if you don't hear from me and you weren't asking a direct question or trying to locate a specific resource, the radio silence you may experience from my end is in no way evidence of my indifference to your virtual attention. I am so grateful for every single comment and every reader this here little blog has. It's just that I also have a mini pack of needlets who are constantly pulling me into the backyard to play baseball or yelling to me about a bodily fluid situation from across the house. And then during the 45 minutes each day that they're (sometimes) all quiet at once? Well, my little introverted heart sighs in blessed relief and I collapse onto the couch and stare vacantly out the window. Or I vacuum. Gosh I love to vacuum...

5. So won't you forgive a mother blogger and her ineptitude in the social media interactivity component of blogging? It's not that I don't care, it's just that I care so much it hurts my brain.

6. And actually, I'm kind of an undercover introvert. If you meet me in real life (I'm looking at you, Edel gals) I'm fairly outgoing-seeming and I like to make people laugh and I can even do a really convincing imitation of a party-loving extrovert, especially with a little liquid courage in my wine glass.

7. But make no mistake. When the sun goes down, I can be found quietly rocking myself back and forth, back and forth (love you forever, like you for always, anyone?) in a dark, quiet room, trying to regain some semblance of mental equilibrium.

Introvert in an extrovert's world up in here.

What about you? I get the feeling sometimes that there are more introverts than extroverts in the blogosphere, just because it's such a natural fit.

Also, I'm an INTJ on the Meyer's Briggs scale. If that helps.

See you at Jen's place.

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p.p.s. Please, please please please consider linking your email to your name in your comment form. It means the world to me when I do have the time and wherewithal to respond because then when I finish tap tapping a little reply email I don't experience that hulking dread when that little 'no-reply at blogger.com' message pops up, indicating to me that I've just spent precious human resources emailing cyberspace and not an actual human. Grace has a great tutorial on how to do this, here.