I have to really force myself to be extroverted. I’ve gotten pretty good at it, thankfully, but there are still certainly times when I know I’m being awkward and I really have no idea how to make it stop. I’ve never considered myself to be the sort of person with a million friends and I’m a pretty terrible plan-canceller sometimes, which probably doesn't help.

I probably should stick to my word a little better than I do (although I’ve improved with this tremendously over the past few years), but I’ve felt bad about my personality for more reasons than just the fact that I’ve inconvenienced people. In high school, I would literally do my homework during lunch sometimes because it was what I wanted to do, and my friends definitely teased me (lovingly of course) for being the anti-social one. I felt like I should be doing something different when really, I should have been proud of the fact that I had such a wonderful world going on inside of my own mind that I didn’t always need to be completely immersed in the one around me.

I think there’s a lot of people who go through this to some extent at UT, and especially in computer science. We’re smart, so of course that comes with the expectation that we’ll be more involved and give back to our community more because we have the ability to do a lot. Just thinking about all the tabling I’ve seen outside of Gregory this past week makes me a little bit dizzy.

The thing is, you can give back and contribute to the world without being the loudest person giving away the most free t-shirts and gets the most people to sign up for your club. It’s really awesome that there are people with those kinds of abilities, but for those of us that don’t have them, we need to appreciate that we have our own as well. I have friends who make a difference by just tutoring one person at a time, or creating art that allows them to influence people without even being in the same room as them or writing such incredible articles for our blog that people reading them are convinced to go to UT even though they’ve never actually met the author (seriously, read the awesome article that Rohan wrote last year).

How to appreciate ourselves just isn’t well defined for us introverts. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it though, because we can be really incredible people, and we deserve to see that. Thankfully, the extra time we have to think to ourselves gives us more time to figure things like this out. Although we might not always have it easy growing up, nothing can confuse us forever and we’ll eventually see the good in ourselves.

Certainly other people do, even if they’re just as bad as we are at showing it sometimes. Appreciate the little things, both the little things you do for other people and the little things that they do for you, because when you’re quiet they can speak pretty loudly.