An Extrovert With Introverted Hobbies
A perspective from David Perretta
I’m an extrovert with introverted hobbies. At least, that’s what the year of coronavirus has taught me.
Hindsight is, pardon me, 2020. Before this (hopefully) brief flash of time, we had a word for people who spend their time planning for seemingly world-ending disasters. Actually, we had a few: lunatic, psychopath, nutjob, headcase, hermit, screwball, madman – or madwoman, and fool, to name a few. The word most of them chose to go by was “prepper.”
And you know what? They weren’t entirely wrong. After all, last March I had to spend nearly an hour in line to buy toilet paper. As the months chugged along and we became used to whatever-the-hell-this-is, goods we took for-granted started slowly coming back on the shelves. It turns out that supply line interruption has not been too miserable for a large chunk of us throughout this pandemic. But there is one thing I – and my friends – have discovered we all needed more than canned food: a break from the sheer, horrifying, bleak boredom.
Great, I remember thinking at the start of quarantine, I’ll have a weekend or two to catch up on my TV shows and finish the novel I’m reading. The fourteen days in March came… And went… And then came back in perpetuity. There I was, done consuming the backlog of media I had always wanted to slog through, but never had the time to see. Nothing was left to occupy my mind.
Worst of all: I’m an MBA student. A type-A personality. A natural extrovert, constantly seeking a conversation companion. You get the picture – the lack of things to do, places to go, and people to see was driving me mad. Every time I spoke to somebody, there was nothing new to discuss. I was… Bored.
It was on a phone call mid-April when my friend Alex reminded me of my own personality traits that might cure this malaise. “David,” she told me, “weren’t you teaching yourself to draw pre-pandemic?” It’s true, I was. But, as I reminded her, I was stranded at my parents’ home in Connecticut, and my art supplies were down in Chapel Hill. “What does that matter?” she asked. “I’m sure you can figure something out.”
Inspired, I took to my childhood desk. A pencil, a blue ballpoint pen, a black sharpie, and a few blank pieces of paper were waiting for me alongside the treasures my twelve-year-old self stored in those drawers. It was not much, but it was enough to get started. Was my rendition of Super Mario and Yoshi (medium: pen and paper) worthy of hanging in the Met? Not even a little. But it was satisfying enough to spark an idea. From that point onwards, I would double down on introverted projects and constantly tell (read: bother) my friends about them on the phone to maintain my own sanity.
Shockingly, the concept worked. Every introverted activity I turned into a social movement. Drawing something? Let me share it with friends, even if it’s terrible. Fiddling on the piano? Time for a quick FaceTime to play the game “can you recognize this song, or am I nowhere near good enough yet?” Practicing programming games? That meant it was time to do a share screen on Zoom and show friends projects that would never come to fruition.
Just like that, I discovered that indulging introverted interests could excite my extroverted energies. Through simply turning every hobby into a conversation with friends, I suddenly had both a) something to do in my free time and b) something to talk about in my free time. Was this a major revelation? Not in the slightest. Sometimes it’s the small things that help you survive.
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