Introverts are more likely than extroverts to express intimate facts about themselves online that their family and friends would be surprised to read, to say that they can express the “real me” online, and to spend more time in certain kinds of online discussion. They welcome the chance to communicate digitally. The same person who would never raise his hand in a lecture hall of two hundred people might blog to two thousand, or two million, without thinking twice. The same person who finds it difficult to introduce himself to strangers might establish a presence online and then extend these relationships into the real world
Quiet | Susan Cain
Like many writers, I am an introvert. In fact, like many writers, I am extremely introverted. I'm not just a little quiet and reserved, I very much am, probably to an excess more often than not. Introversion and extroversion exist along a spectrum, and, while most people lean between 60-80% in one direction or other, I fall in the 90-95% range. (Note: These percentages are from personal estimation, not scientific evaluation.).
Like most writers, I am an introvert. And it's perhaps because I'm an introvert that I'm a writer. The cerebral nature of introversion catalyses contemplation and reflection. It nurtures the 'inner world' as Margaret Schlegel describes it. I live inside more than outside. I live in my mind and my emotions more than in the physical world and its events. I'm more alive in my thoughts—and sometimes more alone in them. The digital world provides a bridge between the inner world and the outer world.
Sometimes, I muse about my mortality, and I wonder how much of me will be 'lost in thought,' disappearing without ever having shown itself to the world through words. Some people leave their legacies through great acts or institutions or organizations, but writers do more than leave memories of themselves behind. We create immortality by weaving ourselves within our words. We don't just produce work; we live inside it by breathing life into words.
When you read the life's work of a writer, you're reading pieces of their life. Just pieces, mind you. Even if you read every jot that's been penned—stories, journals, letters, notes—even if you read every jot and stroke, know that those words are only single breaths. No one, not even a writer, can be reduced to even the most eloquent stream of words.
William Jones – A man has as many social selves as there are distinct groups of persons whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups
When a writer dies and people read their words for the first time, they discover depths they never knew existed and couldn't possibly have fathomed. They're introduced to another world, the inner world of someone else. They read things that were never meant to be said aloud and encounter things they were never meant to understand. Writers don't always write for an audience; sometimes they never do.
But even if no one reads a single syllable a writer composes, even if the words die with the writer and are never unrecognised, we still lived. It may have been a small and selfish life, but it contained sparks of vigour with special inspiration and insight. If no one reads a single syllable, it is a loss twice lost but never felt
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