Hello Raschaverak,

You're not alone, I'm a bit in the same situation for many points. ^^

You shouldn't regret your studies. I'm sure that you had a very precise idea : you wanted to success in your studies. You sacrifice a lot like not participating parties and having a restricted social life. It was a sacrifice helped by the fact you were introvert.

So what ? You can't check but maybe you would have been bored by those parties. Maybe, if you had had more social life, you would regret it now because you would have missed your studies.

Who can say, honestly ? it's not wise to regret the past. Stupid choices are rare, you would have had a reason at one moment and at one maturity state.

I really think your main problem now is that you're obsviously depressed :you maybe lack of D vitamin or have a lack of other things : take care of you and make an blood analysis.

The second point is that you've got a way of becoming social : you say you like exercising, so why don't you subscribe to a sport association/club ? It's a way to meet people who share already one passion ! If you want to change, you have to give a possibility to try.

Last edited by breakies (2011 May 30, 6:31 pm)

You feel happy mainly from exercising and eating sweets
you have isolated yourself from the world and now want to become social.

So you want to:

Social needs
1 Cure your social anxiety or rather leave it at it and become an unsociable scientist-like person
2 party
3 have a social life
4 have a girlfriend

Existential needs
5 find meaning in your life, a reason to live
6 learn to enjoy life
7 learn to set right goals.

Intellectual needs
8 have order in your life (a kind of a systematic way of approaching life?)
9 increase your intelligence or cure your possible mental issue

------------
9 to-do things, huh?
Solving some of them supports solving your other problems.

Find the most important problem to solve and start doing something.
The fact that you say that you have a label "introvert" on you doesn't actually mean anything. If you don't like this mere label to such an extent that you don't want to live, you might as well kill yourself. It's not such a desperate situation, right?

If you have decided to live, start doing something. And don't give up before something changes. That's a goal for you. Not easy to achieve for you, and not impossible either - just as you wanted, something between the 2.

The way I see this is that if you start bringing people into your life well enough, at least half of those problems will be solved very soon.
Arrange meetings or add random people who live near you on skype and start socializing.

Be creative, try not to be boring. And pay attention to important things in social life, such as looks, hygiene, etc...

Being introverted doesn't have many pros, but being extroverted does. 

However, it's not really a choice for most people.  They simply are who they are.

I'm an introvert, too, and I've found that it makes language learning a lot harder than if I wasn't.  Instead of kicking myself for being who I am, I simply find ways that work for me.

I do fight it a bit, though.  I've been trying to get out to parties more often, and make more friends.  I've got a couple Skype language partners and I plan to find a couple more once I'm better at speaking.

Introverts are cool. They got this intriguing aura about them.

They're... mysterious.

That's what one of my Japanese friends said once. Lol.

All the interesting movie/book characters are introverts anyway.

Can you imagine Batman as a bubbly extrovert?

Overly extroverted people tend to piss me off.

I'm fairly introverted. When I meet new people I don't tend to say much and just listen to the conversation and laugh in all the right places However once I am comfortable around the people I am with, it's a completely different story - but I guess most people tend to be like that.

I graduated from university last month, and I have to say that my uni student life sucked. I decided to keep living at home and so that meant that I could only attend the one university in my town. It isn't the greatest to be honest, and after first year they only offered business subjects via distance/online. So 75% of my degree was spent in my bedroom studying by myself - I really got into a rut and didn't want to go out or do anything. Not to mention most of my friends had moved away to study elsewhere, and apart from one friend who still lived here, I grew apart from my other friends (water under the bridge, different life direction/view of life, all those sort of things). So my point is that I never had this great partying social life or whatever, and I used to think how great it would be blah blah blah...though the catch is I don't really like drinking that much. I always feel like whoever I am with is pressuring me to just drink more and more when I don't want to (I don't listen to them, but it is still annoying when you are just trying to enjoy yourself and they are wanting to get wasted.)

Anyway, I got to a point where I couldn't handle living the same mundane life day in and day out so I bit the bullet and took a scholarship to Japan (as I had also studied Japanese). I sort of saw it as a reward for those 3 years of endless studying locked up in my bedroom plus a chance to improve my Japanese. When I applied it was a great idea, but as time went on I really began shitting myself about the whole thing and even wanted to pull out before I went (+1 to my introvertedness). But in hindsight I guess that was just fear of the 'unknown', although I had already been to Japan once before.

Once I got there and made new friends I felt like I was a different person. I didn't have all these people around me who thought this or that about me or thought I didn't like to go out, or I didn't like drinking. And I didn't feel like I had to keep being the person that I always had been. Also I didn't have my parents around either, so that makes things a whole lot easier...I went out drinking at nomikais, went to parties are the dorms, snuck drinks into karaoke all sorts of things. It was great because I finally got to have a bit of that social life that I had missed out on.

Within a week or two of coming home though I felt like I had slipped back into my old self. I had changed but everything was exactly the same - my room, my house, the street, the town, my friends, everyone's little unnecessary dramas. What I miss most is being who I wanted to be - even having gone there and come back, I was much more confident at the time than what I am now. It really sucks. But atleast I have all these new amazing friends from all over the world that I met in Japan and even if I can't be with them everyday, we still talk on skype and facebook. They are my sanity.

So what I am trying to say is just because you are an introvert doesn't mean you have to live your life as an introvert. Yeah I wasn't always comfortable meeting new people or hanging out with everyone I met while I was away, but over time you gain confidence. You realise that people want to talk to you and be friends with you for who you are, not the fact that you grew up together and the friendship is just there for 'convenience' so to speak. More importantly you realise your potential and what you are capable of. Even making small changes can do this - I'm not necessarily saying that you should pack up your life and move to Japan to fix the problem because it won't. If you move to Japan for example and remain as an introvert and only do introverted things, expect your life to be much worse than what it is now. But it is up to you to put yourself out there, and bare all your insecurities, which can be the most terrifying thing to do, but you'll see that eventually it does pay off.

Edit: thanks for making this thread. felt good to get that off my chest too

Last edited by SendaiDan (2011 May 30, 10:49 pm)

I've always been very introverted/shy, but I've started getting out more in these last 6 months and have discovered that I'm much more socially adept than I thought, I really enjoy getting out these days.
I've also stopped caring about emotional things lately, it's a big relief, just take things as they come and enjoy whatever I'm doing.

One of my friends shared this with me lately:
The three second rule: Identify a girl you'd like to ask out, and strike up a conversation within three seconds of first seeing her. No chances to get nervous etc. The majority of this friend's partners have been made that way. It's quite fun.

solwyvern wrote:

TIL
　内向 = Introvert
　外交 = Extrovert

Incidentally, I made myself introvert to study Japanese. I cut of all ties with close friends and acquaintances from college. They never really shared my interest to learn a new language. Only people I talk to nowadays is family.

As a result of this, I passed N4 last Dec and determined to pass N2 this year. Then will go back to rebuilding my social life.

Why?  It's completely possible to study Japanese a damn lot and still go out every once in a while.

solwyvern wrote:

TIL
　内向 = Introvert
　外交 = Extrovert

外向, surely?

I am fairly introverted and I am currently an undergraduate at a school of management. From what I observe, introverts are a minority here, but not an insignificant one. We also tend to do rather well academically, whereas extroverts have rather large discrepancies - nearly all the best and pretty much all the worst students are extroverts (although there was that one guy who was so introverted he even creeped me out, and he is on academic probation now). Most of our assignments are group projects and what I noticed is that the best groups are those that have a mixture of personalities. And I don't feel like we introverts are at a disadvantage for things like internships, because the school's contacts offer a wide variety of positions that require different kinds of skills and personalities. As dizmox said, "manager" is a pretty generic title and the range of possible activities is pretty large. Last summer I worked in an accounts department where pretty much all I did was filing and archiving paperwork. Although this summer I want to try something that will showcase my English skills - gotta live up to my reputation as the best English speaker on campus.

As for the feeling of emptiness, I have had that, although in my case it was less about the kind of life I never had and more about the kind of life I lost. I have had my share of partying due to having had some very extroverted friends back in high school. We got separated as a result of some really dumb decisions on my part, and I started my first year of college in the US having made my peace with the fact that I will have no friends there. In fact I did manage to make plenty of good friends who were all fairly introverted. Wild parties got replaced with nerdy pursuits and I liked it that way. But then the crisis started and my family's financial situation worsened, so I had to transfer the the school I am studying at right now in Russia. Now I have no friends, neither extroverts nor introverts (I do occasionally hang out with my cousin and his friends, but we have very different worldviews, so pretty much the only things we talk about are anime and music). I was in a severe depression for about six months, until I started learning Japanese. Now I guess I am just doing the things I enjoy and just don't give a damn about anything else. I would have had no second thoughts about just giving up on society and becoming a full-time hikikomori if my school studies weren't going so well. Don't know if my attitude is healthy, but it does help me enjoy my present life and not cry over spilled milk.

Last edited by vonPeterhof (2011 May 31, 3:09 am)

thecite wrote:

The three second rule: Identify a girl you'd like to ask out, and strike up a conversation within three seconds of first seeing her. No chances to get nervous etc. The majority of this friend's partners have been made that way. It's quite fun.

A Nice one!

Imagine that you're in Japan in a club and go out to breathe some air. There's this nice girl standing there alone.
「すみません！劣等感ってなんですか？説明してくれませんか？外国人なんですからこの言葉はわかりません」
The woman thinks: Wow, COOL!!! A foreigner who's talking to me in Japanese!!!

And by the time she takes her time, explains this (or any other) complicated word in Japanese you have already striked up a conversation with her

Alcohol definitely helps (unless you have clinical depression, in which case it'll probably just make you more depressed).