What I Don’t Say
Some people find it hard to form new relationships. I’m one of them. Crossing the line between an acquaintance and a friend has always been difficult for me. Since middle school, I’ve lived within a stable, predictable set of relationships that never really changed.
That doesn’t mean I want relationships that stay frozen in place. When I meet someone I like, I want to share all kinds of experiences with them, and sometimes I want to cross that line. But taking the first step myself is frightening. So whenever there’s someone I like or want to grow closer to, all I’ve ever done is send signals hoping they’ll be the one to cross it first.
Even I think it’s a strange way to be, and I used to wonder if I was alone in this — until I read a book this week called The Birth of Personality, which helped me understand myself a little better. The book explains personality through five categories known as the Big Five, and among them, extraversion and neuroticism seem most relevant to who I am.
The extraversion described in the book isn’t the same as the E vs. I divide in MBTI — whether you’re sociable or not. Instead, it’s described as the degree to which a person seeks reward from new experiences. I’ve always been open to trying new things. I love reading new books, visiting exhibitions at art museums, experiencing live music. I love traveling abroad to take in natural landscapes completely unlike anything in Korea. Even reading an essay by someone whose life is entirely different from mine feels fresh and novel. Of course I’m not interested in everything the world has to offer, but generally speaking, learning and experiencing new things brings me joy.
The book also addresses another dimension of personality: neuroticism. As described there, neuroticism is “the degree to which one detects crisis and tends to worry” — how much a person frets over whether things might go wrong, or instinctively thinks of risk before anything else. This is where I start to find some clues about my own character.
When I think about it, I worry a great deal about things that happen between people. Perhaps it’s because of certain memories from when I was young — times when I expressed what I liked and disliked in raw, unfiltered ways, and later came to regret it. I still catch myself thinking, I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have said that. So somewhere around middle and high school, as I grew up a little, I stopped showing my feelings openly. I learned to swallow what I liked and disliked, and digest it alone. And I stopped crossing the line with other people.
Living with high neuroticism in relationships has made me sensitive to failure. I feel this vague pressure to get along with everyone, and being disliked by even a few people is genuinely hard. I’m afraid of being looked down on or talked about behind my back. So I’ve tried not to stand out from the crowd, and whenever someone asked me something, I tried to give a safe, unremarkable answer.
Part of it is also that I think of myself as having many quirks that set me apart from others. I worried that the more someone came to know me, the more likely they were to end up disliking me. The people I find especially difficult are those who see everything in black and white, and those who only understand things at face value. It’s hard to get close to people like that.
So what choices should I make going forward — someone like me, with high neuroticism around relationships but also high openness, someone who genuinely wants to meet more people? Should I build up the mental muscle to speak casually even to people I find difficult, as though it costs me nothing? Or should I focus on finding people who can understand this sensitive, frustrating heart of mine?
Who bears the responsibility for what goes unsaid? The person who doesn’t speak — or the person who makes it impossible to?