Extreme Extroversion as Mental Illness?

Can’t fall asleep again. This isn’t coherent enough to lay out a well-articulated case for the possibility of my extreme personality as a manifestation of deficiency and classifiable deviance but it’s some fragments for it.

I know a billion people and almost none of them really care much about me. It occurs to me that my deviance in terms of extroversion might put me somewhere on a mental illness spectrum. It’s not like I don’t see the disproportionate effort and intensity in my interactions with others… I’ve just always been reconciling it to myself and others one way or another. Perhaps I shouldn’t be lying to myself?

Even the people who are resistant to my high-level of intensity and energy treat me with this distanced sort of rapport. They ought not invest too much, lest they lure out the tidal wave of interactivity and expectation. Usually when I feel bad about others never proactively caring about me I try to channel my energy into doing something that helps someone else but this might just recreate the cycle. It instead creates “guilt debts” that aren’t authentic or intrinsic reciprocation. They also might exacerbate power disparities.

I do think it’s a legitimate concern, how much and if I choose to ignore implicit social cues left by the void of inaction. I’m not all that dramatically outside of what my friends growing up were like – I keep having to remind myself that CU is this weirdly-scoped/adorned/person-populated place, if I were in say DC it might be a very different story. Interestingly of all the people I know I can think of only half a dozen extroverted “initiator + leader” type women here in CU under the age of 40 and none of them actually like me.

I’m aware others would initiate if they wanted friendships or relationships and that they probably want to keep me at a distance because they deduce [some of] my intentions and they likely don’t have the same kind of reciprocative feelings. Perhaps there’s emotional baggage or fear I haven’t yet comprehended. Either way it’s those voids made of inaction and silence that I’m hyper-aware of, only minimally able to interpret and yet expected to have a keen sense or understanding of. That is perhaps where my disability lies – discerning what people think and feel purely from implications and indirect fragments of communication is like an autistic kid trying to figure out complex emotions. We can make it an intellectual enterprise but we can’t live it experientially like others do to understand it. And this is really representative of so many interpersonal interactions in my life. I’m simultaneously insanely friendly, loyal and charismatic and yet horrendously broken in my perceptual bias. Like my abusive biological mother only I’m at least self-aware enough to have continual critical introspection and revisioning. I also can only retain sadness for about a day or two, which would put me perpetually on the manic end of bi-polar (the Ginger family favorite condition), an expression of that condition that I’ve never heard of, as of yet.

So it’s back to my age-old question. How much I “bottle up” during my tacitly illustrious (read: stupid) impression-management escapades. Lately I’ve been doing things like falling in love for month-long relationships with mini-celebrities, dancing alone at weddings, live blogging online dating drama and putting videos of myself being derpy on the internet, which would indicate some healthy overdue uncorking. But my relationship support web is more fraught, frayed and fragmented than ever before. The only people who get and accept me and who have the capacity to overtly care about me seem to be a thousand miles away without any real time for it and I’ve been scaring off the flowing river of locals at an astounding rate.

I don’t know where this leaves me, but I at least feel better putting it out there for nobody to read. Time to play a videogame.