Rhythm of a Blue Tit Bird
The small studio apartment, with a tiny loft for a bed above the living area, seems always a reflection of my state. It starts clean every semester, well prepped, even optimistic. The clutter comes slowly at first, but around week eight, what’s on the bookshelves and inside the cabinets and closets can no longer be contained. It all spills out, piles up, and I lose sight of what was once visible beneath, those hardwood floors I liked so much when I first moved in. But in summer break, the books and papers and day-to-day items are made to retreat to bookshelves, to cabinets, to closets, and I start to take notice of what is underneath again. I’ve been told, by people who know me, that my creative output is directly related to the amount of pacing I do in a day. I try not to think what that means for the weeks and months when there isn’t space to make any moves that don’t have an external, functional purpose.
One night, unable to sleep, a Bible verse comes to mind as I do laps on the newly-rediscovered hardwood floor. I chase the words before me even though they don’t feel context appropriate. The fact is I can’t remember the context of the verse anymore. Ironic because, twenty years ago, when every verse came with a sermon to contain it, the power of paradox was likely blocked from imagination by religious context and moral connectors. I believe the verse says, “The first shall be the last and the last shall be the first.” I wonder if this verse includes a parable in order to make the concept solid. Isn’t that the way it goes? The words are assigned a parable, the parable a religion, and soon enough what made the words special—the flexibility inherent in them—is placed in service of a single narrative, pre-packaged alongside the words. It’s the irony of ideology, too often—that which comes to set us free from one prison seeks to lead us to the next. Yet, two decades removed from any sermon on those thirteen words and they start to loosen themselves from previous trappings. In loss, gain. The words stretch out before me, as I stretch out to them. In the morning, I find myself revisiting Richard M. Capobianco on Freud, Jung, and introversion, knowing that access will be granted this time.
*
Freud comes first on introversion. This reality stays with me because Freud framed introversion as pathology. Through this lens, introversion finds its first conversation as something that is abnormal, to the point that someone like Jung, who seeks to expand the concept of introversion in positive ways, will begin his conversation on introversion as pathology as well.
Most introverts don’t need to know this history in order to understand that their concept of introversion likely began in something like pathology as well. As long as we form our initial identities in a culture that leans extroverted, like ours does in the West, an introvert will likely first encounter the term when asking, “What is wrong with me” or “Why am I so different from those around me?” When our initial identities, formed in youth, are predominantly formed by the external, we will never start our journey where an introvert most needs to begin, which is within.
If you ask my mom, she’ll say she noticed differences in me from birth. She says I was hyper attentive, overly observant, more in need of her time than my siblings. She tells a story about rocking me as a baby and seeing my brow furrowed. She wondered if something was wrong, if I were sick or stressed, only later realizing I was mimicking the furrow in her own brow. Her furrow was brought on by an onslaught of migraines, ones that would become my companion a few decades later. A little older, she says I ran up to her, Tweety-Bird pajamas juxtaposing an earnestness beyond necessity. I tugged at her to reveal something that had been tugging at me.
“Mama,” I said. “I think I like being sad.”
About the time my memories join these plot points, I’m ten-to-twelve years old, on the bottom mattress of a fire-red bunk bed, ruminating my day away. I’ve convinced myself that I will never be enough like others to be part of their world. I want to play basketball at the little Baptist school I attend, but I’m too scared to ask anyone to teach me. I don’t want to make mistakes in front of others, especially if they cost the whole team. I want to learn at home first, become first, but I know that day will never come. I tell myself I’m too old now. My life has passed me by. Even then, it felt like a midlife crisis arrived as my age hit double digits. I’d like to laugh now, but it wasn’t funny then. All I knew was what the external world told me. In my house were wrestling figures. Outside was a trampoline. Alone, or with my brother, we imagined ourselves as heroes, champions, storytellers, the introverted extroverting itself in games, play, and great, grave battles.
Much of my youth felt like an unsolvable math problem no more difficult than one plus one. With the slightest bit of understanding, I could transfer who I was at home into who I was in public. I believed this. I daydreamed it. In some ways, I expected it. But just as true, I knew nobody was going to stumble along and interpret my social situations with a little introvert understanding. Hell, even I didn’t fully understand what it was I needed, so how would anyone grasp what I could not articulate? It felt, always, like two worlds—internal and external—sat close enough to merge but far enough away that they never quite could. Only knowing a world where the external confirmed the internal, I waited decades for someone to come and do that merging with me, if not for me.
Somewhere in my mid-to-late twenties, a nontraditional undergraduate at university, I waited still. One night I happened upon a poetry slam at the recommendation of friends. At this time, I knew little about poetry, saving two poems I had written previously at community college. My friends and I sat towards the back, and I remember not being entertained as much as transfixed. People spoke loudly, freely, as if they were on a private trampoline placed upon a public stage. To this day, I can’t retrace the steps, but I ended up on that stage, reciting my poems on introversion and social anxiety. It was only after the event that I was told they had judged the contestants to pick a top three who would earn a trip out of state to a regional poetry slam.
I had been picked third.
Weeks later, maybe months—the time and distance I don’t recall—I walked through the doors of a university lecture hall out of state, with many chairs and a single stage. I knew I’d be required to be on that stage, to perform those poems, and to be judged by people I hadn’t met. I didn’t know how I would do that, but I had agreed to it and I would do it. What I didn’t know, what nobody told me, was that there would be social events all the way up to the time of performance.
There went my time alone. There went preparation. There went the introvert need to get away and get a vision for what was to come. For many introverts, the only way to step onto the stage is to have perceived it enough that when it comes time to do it, it’s simply one more mental walkthrough, played out in some fifty-fifty split between real-time public and mind-rehearsed private.
When we arrived at the university initially, it felt like a pan over from a story already in progress, and I felt as if I were watching from outside my body. Folks from other schools were sitting in a circle, freestyling. One would jump out of their seat and proclaim part of a poem, sit down, and deliver the invisible mic to the next person up. It was a sight to behold, and, like much in my life, I wanted to be around it but not within it. I watched from afar, briefly, before escaping to my room, knowing I would never be ready for the official performance if I didn’t have time to myself.
A short while later, I found myself in conversation with a familiar face. It was the representative from our university, whose name I can’t remember. He was the one who drove us there. He was the one, along with two others, who heard my poems on introversion and social anxiety and picked me for this trip.
Now he stood flabbergasted at my lack of attendance at the social events, and I stood flabbergasted at his lack of understanding for my lack of attendance. I tried to explain, voice shaking. I thought that on the other side of an explanation, perhaps more difficult than the performance itself, he’d understand and even wish me a word or two of comfort and support.
What he said, instead, is the only part of the trip I remember in its exactness. His response wasn’t complicated. It was seven words, and then he was gone.
“Come on, man,” he said, pausing to allow an air of disappointment to rise between us. “Don’t be that guy.”
The rest of the trip was a blur. I attended the events, though I barely talked. I sat in the audience, waiting for my turn at spoken word, more of my mind on what happened than what was happening. I’m not sure I spoke a word on the way back to university, and I never attended a function with that group again. All I took was a single lesson from that trip: speaking on introversion can leave you feeling less heard than if you never uttered a word.
It would be another decade, in my own classroom, before I truly returned to the topic of introversion. In those classes, I’ve seen students struggle to integrate the internal with the external. Sometimes we take the Myers-Briggs personality assessment, and I let each student reflect on any section they want. I’ve seen a pattern over the years. It’s almost always a cluster of introverts who, on first reflection, zero in on nothing but perceived weaknesses, limitations, what they’ve been convinced they cannot do, cannot be.
And why wouldn’t they?
We live in a world where Freud comes before Jung, like external adaptation comes before going inward and finding one’s self.
*
“The first shall be the last and the last shall be the first.”
Those words stayed with me as guide throughout the start of summer, without need of a sheet of paper to carry them on. When I first reflected on them, I thought they would wrap this journey in a mystical quality. After all, paradox is part of what I longed for, and those words seem chock-full of it. Yet, often, what seems mystical is no more than a practical lesson that has been outside the rotation of culture too long. It only seems mystical because the words become so unpracticed that we can put them in front of our face and still not remember what to do with them.
It’s the paradox of that which otherwise seems inherent. Like being an introvert who has given preference to the external so long that you think the only way to go inward is to reach outside yourself for another layer, like adding a scarf in wintertime. Or being an introvert who has given preference to the external so long that you think the only way to go inward is to know who comes first between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Forgetting that going inside could be called going underneath, like rediscovering the hardwood floor buried by one too many books or papers—it’s still underneath whether you see it or not, and what you need to do is remove what covers it, rather than adding to it. In removing, you step outside of thought and reenter experience. In removing, you remember that no matter who came first between Freud and Jung, introversion itself, and the creative will to introvert, came before both.
*
One night in midsummer, I find the path least taken. I go inward to a place that isn’t concerned with internal versus external. In fact, as I zoom inside-out-and-outside-in, I see the internal and external lay atop each other like two sides of the same coin.
Comfortable in bed on a night when no video is playing in the background, I find myself in a moment where I know it’s never actually been either or. Rather, it’s looking at one’s life as an introvert, knowing that the internal and external will always feed each other, and choosing which will be heads and which will be tails. Through incubation, by going inward, the introvert can invert what has been twisted all along. We can make what’s upside-down right-side-up again. It’s incubation that Jung used to counter Freud. If Freud said we introvert as a way of regressing, Jung noted that we use the same method to access the creative or creation process.
In incubation, there’s invitation, a realigning of both the internal and external versions of the self. Too often, in conversations on introversion, we say introverts like to be alone, and we end the conversation there. Like all we do when alone is sit on our hands. Like all we do when alone is FADE OUT until our next external scene. We say introverts like to be alone, the way Hollywood used to roll credits after “Happily Ever After,” never granting even a glimpse of what goes on under the banner of the phrase. We say introverts like to be alone, as if being alone is simply a source for itself and not the very act required to emerge a little more like who we truly are in a world that will otherwise make us its own.
But even as I make this stand, comfortably in my bed on summer break, I fear I will fall from it in the season to come. These words return me to thought and away from experience, and the process starts back up: What will the version of me then have to say when the inbox is full and the internal supply seems so empty? When all urgency is expected to be given to that which is external. When he feels too tired, too far from himself, will he heed a reminder that he can’t actually be too tired or too far from that which is already underneath?
I ask myself, Would it be possible to essay incubation in a way that leaves breadcrumbs back to the experience itself? Is it possible to illuminate the darkness around being alone and make visible even a portion of what is experienced in—
Incubation. That subtle difference between alone time and loneliness. Incubation. A blinking yellow light in a world where we too often think in red or green. When slowing down becomes an option on par with stop or go. Incubation. A quickening of all that is within, realizing we have instincts in the gut as sure as we have thought patterns in the brain. Incubation. A safe place turned sacred, to make, remake, and unmake, as best we possibly can.
Incubation. Like the YouTube video that comes the morning after quiet. I click it even though it matches nothing in my algorithm before. A blue tit bird hops about a wooden home made for her, and I know like she knows that there’s something in her movement that seems different now. She goes outside and comes back in. She carries straw that looks sufficient for a place to lay. Yet when she slings it from her mouth, there’s so few strands that it barely begins a pile. Most blue tit birds will spend a week or two gathering. This one will take six to seven weeks to make her space ready. I lay in bed, watching, as this bird goes inside-out, inside-out, inside-out. From outside, she brings back sustenance for incubation, and she tests every piece of straw that she’ll add underneath. A bird in this state is instinctual—she doesn’t need a tutorial to build her nest. A bird in this state is fevered—she has a mission that has a repetition. A bird in this state is protective—she has something that can be a complement to the outside world but will not be an offering.
But it’s the repetition that gets me most. No nest is built in one outing, and her incubation requires her to move at a pace all her own. I catch the rhythm of the bird as she goes from inside to outside, again and again, and I wonder what the introvert might build, who we might be, what life we might sustain, if we could build a rhythm and repetition where the internal is our first, the external our last, and we never forget our order, rhythm, or reason again.
