How many of you get this response?  I certainly do and it creates a tangle of reactions in me.  On one hand I feel like an impersonator – that I’ve been misrepresenting myself to the world.  As one friend recently revealed to me “I have been faking it . . . and,” she added, “it is so painful.”  So that is another reaction.  The raw ache of being required by an extrovert-worshiping culture to act inauthentically in order to fit in, be successful, be liked, be heard and seen.  Of course many of us were faking it – that was an adaptive coping mechanism.  

I didn’t even know I was faking it.  This then brings me to anger!  Why the hell do we have to be other than who we are?!?!?!  “Why can’t you accept me as I am?”  I cannot count the many times I screamed those words.

Lastly I come to an empowered wisdom – “I am not faking it anymore”.  Instead I am embracing who I am as an introvert, teaching those who love me about what that means, and unapologetically honoring my style and preferences.  Ah . . . this is more like it!  As one reader of this blog told me this week-end “I feel the freedom to be me!”  Yay!!!!  Woohoo!!! Let’s follow her lead – feel the freedom to be you!