Say no to introvert-shaming and YES to boiled cookies (choco-peanut butter-oatmeal lumps)

[cimorene]

Last night while I was scrubbing the dishes after making

Boiled Cookies

1. 1 2/3 cups (4 deciliters) sugar
2. ½ cup (1,2 deciliters) milk
3. 1/4 cup (0,6 dL) cocoa
4. 1 teaspoon vanilla extract OR 1 tablespoon vanilla sugar

5. 3 cups (7,2 dL) oats
6. ½ cup (1,2 dL) peanut butter

Put sugar, milk, cocoa, and vanilla sugar in a saucepan and bring to boil for one minute.

Remove from heat and beat in oats and peanut butter quickly but thoroughly.

Quickly drop the cookies onto foil or wax paper using spoons before they cool and solidify.

, I had an epiphany. I know, I know, a dishwater epiphany is a major cliché, and I'll try to avoid them in future. My epiphany was this:

1. I am a natural introvert, who


2. has spent my life being bad at making friends with people and then


3. feeling anxious and guilty because I'm bad at it. (For instance, this past year, I've felt awful for not making friends with the other trainee teacher's assistants in my course, since most of the rest of them are making friends with each other. Am I a bad person? Am I judging people and being secretly elitist, like my Mom would always say when I was little, even while she constantly conditioned me to judge everyone from the other side of her mouth?)


4. This contains the implicit assumption that having more friends is a good thing.


5. But I've also spent my life feeling anxious and guilty because I lack the emotional energy to deal with the friends I have, because


6. my introversion is such that I frequently don't have the spoons for any social interaction, let alone for personal investment in all of my friends.


7. My anxiousness the past few weeks because I was too depressed to hold my annual Passover dinner for my local slashas* feels exactly like when I was little and would think, I haven't called Becky in months, she might think I've forgotten about her, I should do that, but man, what if she wants to play that ONE Barbie game - or her Dad answers the phone, I hate him - or if something bad happened in her life, and I won't be able to do anything about that - or what if I get tired and can't keep thinking of things to say and it gets all awkward?


8. And if I had more friends, my emotional obligations (you can debate the extent to which friendship entails obligation till the cows come home, but there's an element of emotional investment required for me) would be even more.


9. And that would be bad!

There's no reason I should have more meatspace friends! I couldn't handle any more face-to-face social interaction! So I should not constantly feel that I'm being a slightly less human organism by failing to meet some mystical invisible Friend Quota.

Time to stop feeling guilty just for being an introvert and bury my head in a book if I want to.

* Also, since I don't believe in any deities and neither do my slashas, I can hold my parents' Jewish Heritage/Hippy Passover any time I want. It hardly matters that I missed the date.

Comments

[cimorene]

Hahahhaha. "Parallel surfing"?

[lotesse]

exactly!