I Choose Not To Talk is a concept created to bring introverts and extroverts together in love and understanding. Barring that, how about
just understanding? Someday we will produce video that highlights the differences between us and hopefully they will be funny. If you’d like to see such content, you may donate at our Indogogo project at: http://igg.me/at/ichoosenottotalk/x/5011549.

As an adolescent introvert I had a very hard time in Junior High and High School. Not necessarily with the academics, but with the one thing most boys have to deal with: Girls.

I will readily admit that I love the female of the species. They fascinate me. But as an introvert, I was forced to admire them from a distance and even when I was approached, a rare event, I could not respond back.

The first such instance involved a girl named Sandra. We knew each other – sort of – in 8th grade, and I had something of a crush on her because she was like me – an introvert – and very quiet. But I could never bring myself to talk to her. I saw her on occasion over the summer, and come 9th grade, she was in my French class. I thought I had some time to make my move. The school that we attended was in England and our parents were stationed at an Air Force base there. When I thought I had time, it was taken from me and then she was gone, without notice, because I hadn’t driven up enough nerve to say something.

The second such instance involved a girl by the name of Penny. Penny was not as introverted as Sandra, but I still admired her from a distance at first. Yet something about her made me want to talk to her. And we finally arranged a date. It wasn’t a good first date in the sense that it was at a winter cotillion and not a movie or something simple. And I have to say I behaved badly. Because I simply didn’t know what to say or do. Penny hardly spoke to me the rest of my time there. I really didn’t do anything that bad. I just didn’t pay the kind of attention to her that I should have.

The third instance came at the Junior prom, where a girl named Christine, another introvert, accepted my invitation to go. It was fun, sort of, but I don’t think either one of us knew how to act, and nothing came of it.

Tip for those introverted guys: Never take a girl to the prom as a first date.

There were other girls at that school that I worshipped from afar, but never built up the courage to talk to. Looking back on it, they probably never even saw me, or had other things to worry about.

In my senior year at high school, at a different school, it was the same thing, different scenery. The one time I talked to a girl, her name was Cathy, and we actually sat and talked for a few minutes, but because I hadn’t learned a thing in my previous dates (because they were such bad dates) the conversation went nowhere.

So I spent the rest of that year worshiping from afar again.

The story of my life as an introvert.

For a teenage boy who was not particularly athletic, not much else mattered in school beyond girls. As I said in my previous blog, this was a time before texting, before email even when boys had to actually talk to girls, and I could not. I kept to myself, I dreamed, and in my dreams I could talk to girls. That didn’t work out very well in reality.

October 17, 2013

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So What is It Like to Be an Introvert? Part 1: Childhood

I Choose Not To Talk is a concept created to bring introverts and extroverts together in love and understanding. Barring that, how about just understanding? Someday we will produce video that highlights the differences between us and hopefully they will be funny. If you’d like to see such content, you may donate at our Indogogo project at: http://igg.me/at/ichoosenottotalk/x/5011549.

I can’t honestly say when I knew I was ‘different’, but it had to be very young. My family tells me I didn’t talk until I was 2 years old. All I know is when I did talk I wasn’t heard, because my family was so loud and obnoxious, I was drowned out. So at an early age, I simply chose not to talk. That’s following me into adulthood. 😉

I stuttered as a child, something that happens to me today if I get rattled. My mother sent me to a speech therapist, but honestly, I don’t remember much about it. What I do remember is that I was teased endlessly in class, made to step in front of class and talk or read, though I really didn’t want to. If I wanted to be heard, true to this day, I had to talk louder than I felt comfortable talking. That was true no matter what school, no matter what teacher. No one undertstood the introverted personality. Even today, a lot of teachers still don’t, hence the term ‘come out of your shell.’ I can’t tell you how many times I heard that and the equal number of times I hated it.

I understand the concept of doing something not in your comfort zone. You learn much by doing that, but to make a child do something that truly makes them uncomfortable for no apparent reason really irked me then and now. You want to bring them out of their shell? You give them projects they like and can do. You don’t force them to do something they don’t like, thereby pushing them deeper into that shell.

In fact, let’s dump the whole concept of ‘shell’ because I’m no turtle, I’m no snail. Give me challenging things to do that don’t involve talking or socializing, and I’ll excel. I really wish I’d grown up in the computer age so that I could have suffered a bit less and used social media or texting to accomplish what it took a voice to do 20 years ago. That really would have helped me with girls, well, a little anyway. But I wasn’t so lucky.

So what is it like being an introverted child in an extroverted world? Frightening! When I’m required to speak… REQUIRED! TO! SPEAK! just to be considered ‘normal’, I tighten up inside. My creativity crawls to a halt and I cannot speak unless I put forth more energy than it’s worth. Some people call it a brain fart. I call it cruel and unusual punishment just to get good marks.

When I was ten years old, my family moved to a neighborhood with a lot of children in it. I thought this would be a good thing until I met 3 girls, two sisters and their friend, who teased me endlessly for not being able to talk to them. They chanted ‘Shy Boy’ until I simply stopped, turned around and went the other direction. This was emotionally devastating to me, and it followed me everywhere, not that everyone wanted to call me ‘Shy Boy,’ but when I wanted to talk to someone, I always heard that chant running through my head.

I’ve heard it said that kids are cruel, and Lord knows those three were for me.

It was such a devastating time of my life, that even now, 40 years later, I still remember it, and cannot easily write about it. I’ve tried to write a screenplay about the incident, but I’m too close to it, and I freeze up when those memories come back.

That is what it’s like being an introverted child. Little things like that have a big impact on us.

October 17, 2013

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The I Choose Not To Talk Motto

October 15, 2013

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I Choose Not to Talk Button!

This is fresh off the presses!

October 11, 2013

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I Choose Not To Talk. So What?

It’s a war out there, where neither side understands one another, and as such, both sides get hurt. I’m not talking physical harm, or bloody violence, I’m talking emotional harm, or just plain indifference. You see, the combatants in this war are Extroverts vs. Introverts.

When I was a kid, no one understood me. I was quiet, preferred to be left alone and could easily lose myself in my imagination.

But my family would have none of that. I was picked on, I was encouraged to ‘come out of my shell.’ I was called on in class and forced to stutter my way through a pointless presentation or read aloud in such a soft voice that no one could hear me, and I’d be forced to raise my voice to the point where I considered myself to be yelling.

As I came into adulthood, I began to understand that I was not alone, but that didn’t really help me, because so much of the world still has expectations that no one is ‘normal’ who cannot act boisterously or with enthusiam. (Boy I hate that word)

I wanted to shut up, and frankly, I wanted the world to shut up too! I was quite content sitting reading a book, or letting my mind drift. But the world hasn’t changed much since I was a kid. I’ve been forced to take jobs where I had to talk, where I had to interact with others in order to make a living.

Fast forward to today, where I simply cannot work like that any more. I wrote a blog a few days ago highlighting why I shouldn’t work in the field of customer service, and one of those points is ‘I don’t like to talk.’

Okay fine, so don’t talk.

But it doesn’t end there, because of the expectations of an extroverted world.

So I decided that more needs to be done. You see, I am quite capable of working, thinking, creating and as such, I’d like to use the gifts I have to promote a better understanding between extroverts and introverts.

Introducing ‘I Choose Not To Talk’, an organization that promotes just that. The concept is that I produce a series of videos that will be combined into a documentary that highlights the differences between the personality types. I plan to shoot a whole bunch of unscripted scenarios where introverts have issues with extroverts. I plan to interview the participants before and after the scenario to get feedback from both types.

The scenarios include:

The Party – Assuming introverts would even want to go to a party, the problems they have fitting in are difficult to overcome.
The Blind Date – Opposites attract?
The Job Interview – Having been on a few of these myself, I have to say they are the worst for introverts.
And my worst case Scenario: The Phone Call – This is especially daunting for an introvert when his or her social energy has been drained by a previous phone call or contact.

There’s a side business in buttons and shirts featuring the ‘I Choose Not To Talk’ logo. I don’t know if that alone would be enough to keep the business going, but I’m sure going to try. I may even add a mouth guard that takes the form of a zipper.

I’ve also started an Indiegogo campaign to help raise funds to get the company off the ground. It can be found at http://igg.me/at/ichoosenottotalk/x/5011549.

So let’s get back to the question asked at the top. So I choose not to talk. Why should you care? Well, first, the interactions can be very entertaining. The scenarios will be unscripted, so who knows what may happen. The second aspect of the videos, if you’ve seen my original video, will be that I plan to take myself on the road, using signs like I did in the video to make my intentions known. The reactions to that should be funny.

Entertainment aside, you should care because it might help you to understand why people act like thay do, and it might keep you from making an ass of yourself, or hurting other people’s feelings.

And that’s the point I’m trying to get across. If you don’t understand someone, you won’t know when you’ve hurt them.

If you look at the logo I created (crude, I know), you’ll see that interspersed with the words is a face. The eyes on the face are looking down, and the ‘mouth’ is zipped shut (in the form of a ~~strikethrough~~). That’s pretty much how I feel most of the time. I hate eye contact, I keep my mouth zipped, and I only talk when I have to.

As this project starts to gain interest, I plan to add other elements, including resources for both introverts and extroverts to understand each other.

So come for the funny videos showing that idiot who won’t talk, and stay for the understanding of why he chooses not to talk.

October 11, 2013