I’ve spent most of my adult life failing at what should be a simple personality test.
It’s a question that most people have probably pondered at one point or another in their life, but whenever somebody asks me if I’m an introvert or an extrovert, I usually just stall. And the reason is because there are so many variables. The answer really just depends on what day of the week it might be, the people I’m around, or even just the mood that I’m in at that moment.
The Evolution of a Label
And my answer has varied at different times in my life too. When I was younger, I was loud and brash and definitely pretty obnoxious. I had zero social intelligence and no filter at all. If you’d asked anyone who knew me back then, they’d have told you I was a textbook extrovert. I thought I was the life of the party, but the reality is that I was just the loudest person in the room because I didn’t know how to be anything else yet.
And then at some time, probably in my 20s, life started getting real. I started to hit walls I didn’t see coming, from past trauma I hadn’t looked at to diagnoses I hadn’t learned to manage yet. And like it is so for so many of us, those failures didn’t just humble me, they shut me down completely.
Hiding in the Quiet Corner
At some point, I started calling myself an introvert because it was a lot easier than admitting I was afraid. It wasn’t that I actually preferred being alone. It was that I’d learned to be scared of people and how they perceived me. It seemed like every time I opened my mouth, I got labeled as “too much” or “too intense.” When you hear those things enough, you naturally start to shrink.
Susan Cain talks about this in one of my favorite books, Quiet. She explains how introversion frequently gets confused with social anxiety or past conditioning, but real introversion is about where you get your energy, not whether you’re actually afraid to speak up. After reading this for the first time, I slowly came to realize I probably wasn’t an introvert after all. I was just a man who’d been hurt too many times and I just didn’t want to get hit again. So, what did I do? I found a quiet corner in every room I found myself in and called it a personality preference just to avoid the sting of being rejected…again.
From Ambivert to Otrovert
At some point, though, I started to do some real work on myself and I slowly rebuilt the foundation that my life had been built on up to that point. It’s something I’ve talked about in other pieces I’ve written, but trust me when I say: Rock Bottom will make you question everything you’ve ever believed. And through those questions, I finally came to realize that I actually liked talking to people, just not all the time or about everything. I played around with the “ambivert” label for a little while, but it didn’t feel quite right either. For some reason, it felt like that new Jeep that tries to be a Jeep and a pickup truck, where it kind of does both things pretty shitty.
And then just recently I found a term that I got pretty excited about when I first saw it, and something clicked: Otrovert.
And the reason it clicked for me is because it talked about energy in a way that’s different from how those labels usually go. Introverts recharge alone, and extroverts recharge with people, right? So to me, that’s all about your external environment. But the term Otrovert switched it to a more intrinsic place because an Otrovert gets their energy from meaning.
The Search for Meaning
If the conversation I’m in is shallow and just surface-level, that’s it man. I’m out. 5 minutes in, and I’m looking for distractions and a way to get out of it. But if the conversation has some real depth to it, I can go on for hours. It gets hard to shut me up at that point. I feel so much more alive when it’s over than when I started the conversation and I find myself even wanting to talk about the conversation after the conversation itself (my ADHD wife HATES that I do this btw lol).
And if you know about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it backs this up. He made a pyramid back in 1943 that showed that once we stop worrying about basic survival and safety, we all start looking for self-actualization and meaning. So now I’m wondering if maybe “otrovert” isn’t even a fixed personality type at all. Maybe it’s just what happens when someone stops trying to analyze their social life and starts actually looking for things that matter.
I’m still not typically a fan of labels in general because I find that when people hear a label, they usually assign a set of traits that end up acting like a box that keeps us from growing outside of that label.
I’m not an introvert or an extrovert. I’m just a guy who’s been seeking meaning most of his life and that right there has made more sense to me than anything else I’ve ever been called.