A Silent Diplomat

As reductive as it is to dismiss this by saying that God has a sense of humor, that also doesn’t make it entirely wrong. Somehow I’ve ended up with some deep, ingrained qualities of mine being diametrically opposed.

Something that I expect will be a common refrain for the foreseeable future is a feeling I have of being adrift, without much in the way of goals or really any ability to navigate my life as it currently stands. My life is comfortable, yes, but also feels stagnant. I can’t shake a feeling that I still haven’t lived up to my potential (the only thing scarier is the thought that maybe I have).

The contradiction I’m discussing is, in short, this. I’m someone with a near-schizoid level of social independence. I don’t generally seek out interaction with others, and am fine going for long periods without much if any of it. It’s not that I dislike social situations or anything; I’m certainly introverted, but far from shy or uncomfortable around others. But for whatever reason, I’m just not generally spurred or led to seek out other people. I’m not a sociopath or anything, and I certainly feel lonely sometimes, it just seems that my threshold for solitude is much higher than average, and I do run out of energy quickly in social situations.

Despite this, my strongest skills and one of the strongest of my innate qualities are very other-people focused.

On the skill side, I have a gift for language and especially for learning it. Foreign languages click for me in a way that they simply don’t for most people, even if I do often struggle with memorizing vocabulary. I haven’t any idea why this is so, it’s just always been the case—I’ve consistently absorbed languages and in particular how they work rapidly and easily, and am more comfortable speaking other languages (even when I’m not very familiar with them) than most other people I’ve come across. The best I can describe it is that the sentence or phrase I want just gets assembled in my head as I go, and my brain rarely stumbles over things like verb or case endings, or at least can recover/correct before my spoken words catch up.

The other of my strongest skills is that I’m a good teacher. I haven’t really figured out why this is or how it works, but I’ve gotten enough feedback from others that it’s apparently true. As best I can tell, it has something to do with the way I conceptualize more complex things in simpler terms, combined with a general vibe that makes people comfortable being wrong. (Related to this, people do seem to feel comfortable sharing a great deal with me, sometimes to a degree that surprises even them.) This of course varies with the individual “student,” as learning styles can vary. But I do try to, at least, recognize when my approach isn’t working and find something else if I can.

The (other?) innate quality is as, well, a diplomat. I have a natural aversion to conflict, but rather than walking away, in me it manifests as a drive to diffuse. I’ve been told that my physical presence is inherently calming; it was once described to me as reducing the temperature a few degrees (in a positive way) when I walk in a room. My natural inclination is to find consensus and try to deflect people from butting heads.

These are all wonderful things, but as is likely clear, they’re inherently people-oriented. They really only serve to affect my interactions with others, or at least the dynamics of social situations. I’ve been trying for awhile to find things I’m good at, but I think I had written off these more socially-focused aspects of myself because of how inherently incompatible they seemingly are with how I tend to be by default.

For example, it might seem like I’d be a good counselor or therapist. I don’t believe this is true, however. For one, I tend to be much more problem-oriented in my thinking, which isn’t really what a therapist does. More importantly, it would be almost if not entirely impossible for me to maintain the focus on one conversation for a full session, much less a full workday. I’ve had jobs that involved a lot of social interaction (be it retail or legal hearings), and they left me exhausted. As these were all done when I was in my 20s or younger (I’m 41 as of this writing), I seriously question whether they would’ve been sustainable. Trying to brute force my way through mentally demanding tasks (and undiagnosed ADHD made those much more numerous than I would’ve thought) has left me with a sustained case of weariness that even years later I’ve not recovered from.

One thing that has come to mind is some kind of spiritual counseling/guidance/whatever. I don’t know enough about my options there to know if the same pitfalls may apply, to say nothing of how uncomfortable I feel with the idea of being such a spiritual resource. Granted I enjoy thinking about and writing about my own religious life and journey, but holding myself out as some kind of authority is a wholly different thing. To say nothing of actively trying to advise someone on a specific problem they’re having...

Despite all that, I can’t ignore the gentle tugging in that direction, something I’ve felt periodically in the past. Because I get bored with things easily, one of the few heuristics I have for deciding that hey, I may actually want to do this, is seeing if it’s something that I keep coming back to regardless of how much time I do or don’t devote to it. I took a couple graduate-level classes at a seminary a couple of years ago, but hit a very solid wall about two-thirds of the way through the semester such that I just could not get myself to do the work anymore (I ended up withdrawing from both). I never felt like they were too demanding, but some form of burnout is the best explanation I’ve been able to come up with.

I was going to say that I’m “considering” going back and trying again, but if I’m honest that’s not the right word. It implies a more intellectual process, a weighing of pros and cons, than is actually happening. I want to do it, I’ve mostly decided to do it, I just can’t bring myself to actually pull the trigger (so to speak). My plan this time is to be more conservative and only take one class, which is devoted to writing, so I should have a much easier time managing. If nothing else, I find myself writing all the time anyway.

I don’t have a clear idea of what’s holding me back. If I had to guess, it’s that right now I’m in a place where it’s all potential: I can imagine any (or no) results of this decision, and reality so rarely lives up to expectations that I have a hard time convincing myself that actually going through with it is a better alternative. As I said above, I’m also intimidated by the idea of some kind of responsibility for others, which conflicts (we have us a theme) with this feeling I have that too little of what I do really connects to the world beyond myself.

My attraction to something akin to “writing as ministry” is that it’s potentially the best of both worlds. I can get much of the benefit of my skills (and I’m sure some of the other qualities I mentioned would come through) without worrying about social burnout.

How would a second-century hermit have handled the internet, I wonder?