SNAPSHOTS OF A LIFE TOLD THROUGH HAIKU

Wallflower to Gadfly

My personality didn’t change so much as emerge from its shell

Photo from Freepik

Note to readers: In 2022, for that year’s 100 Day Project, I wrote haiku for 100+ snapshots taken over the course of my life, by me, family members, or friends. Instead of having these buried in the bowels of Instagram, I decided to use them for a series of experimental stories, including this one.

I recently spent a long weekend with two female friends of long standing: one from grad school days in the 1980s, one from 1997 when we met playing in a rec basketball league. Neither of them can quite believe me when I tell them that I was a shy introvert whose nickname in junior high school was “Chris Anne the Mum” for how quiet I was in art class (Anne is my middle name).

While there are still vestiges of that reticence — I’ve never been a good networker, because talking to strangers! — I recognize that I am actually an extrovert, in the true meaning of the word. I get energy being around friends. I initiate hugs coming and going from get togethers. I enjoy being goofy, and making jokes, even on myself, while playing pickleball.

Two questions: Did my personality change? And, Is that even possible?

Psychologists view personality as comprising five major personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. It used to be thought that our personalities coalesced by our early 20s; in fact, researchers now believe that, except for extraversion, these traits change over the course of adulthood.

As the Neurolaunch editors summarize, we tend to become more conscientiousness and agreeable with age, and less neurotic — but also less open to new experiences.

It’s like our emotional skin gets thicker, making us more resilient to life’s little (and big) annoyances. So, if you find yourself getting less worked up about that neighbor who always parks in your spot, congratulations! You’re experiencing the joys of aging.

However, they write, extraversion tends to remain relatively stable throughout adulthood.

The question for me is, was I actually an extrovert in hiding in my teens and 20s, or am I the rare person who changed her stripes? Maybe my “photohaikus” can shed light.

Brought up to be afraid of, well, almost everything

Thanks to Mom being exposed to German measles while she was carrying me, I was born with a cataract in my left eye. While I was lucky that was the only apparent birth defect, it was one that they couldn’t correct in spite of half a dozen surgeries as an infant. So my childhood was spent avoiding any activity that might “take out your good eye.” The caution seeped into my bones. Couple that with being picked on for being fat, wearing corrective shoes and eyeglasses, and being a nerdy “goody two shoes,” and you have a recipe for self-protection. My body language reflected someone trying to make themselves a smaller target.

This is about as daring as I got in high school, making a costume from trash bags to match a nickname my taller best friend gave me when I kept trying to spike a volleyball, “Little Green Sprout.” Family photo archive.

Peeking out of the shell

Along with most of my college’s student body, I commuted for the bulk of my three-year stint. While I wasn’t a target of mockery anymore, neither was I of much interest to the opposite sex. I made some casual friends playing on the tennis team and in a rec league, but without living on campus, I didn’t really form strong bonds. The one semester I did live on campus, my suite mates were seriously into weed, an interest I didn’t share.

Nonetheless, I did do something far more adventurous than anything to date: I flew to California to visit one of my mentor professors and his wife, where I borrowed their car and managed to traverse L.A.’s infamous freeways. In spite of the dire warnings, I even took a ride on Space Mountain at Disneyland.

Somehow I managed to fly from Buffalo to Santa Monica and drive LA freeways in a borrowed car, powered by the bravery of a crush. Author photo.

Once I got to grad school, I started poking out of my shell more often. I had two boyfriends at the same time. I attended happy hours at the local collegetown dive with fellow grad students. After getting a Mass Media Fellowship from AAAS, I spent a summer working at the San Francisco Chronicle and living in Berkeley, sharing an apartment with a guy I knew only from the fact that his roommate was spending the summer at another news outlet for his fellowship.

“Big city reporter,” shy suburban girl body language.

I’d rather write than speak

I spent the first part of my professional life working as a science and medicine reporter, far more comfortable writing than interviewing. To this day, I still avoid calling strangers on the phone, but back then, I dreaded having to interview scientists for stories, because I didn’t want to sound like an idiot. Which meant that I spent enormous amounts of time reading about radiology, infectious disease, and any other topic I’d have to write a story about.

I can still remember feeling humiliated by the editor in chief of JAMA during a weekly staff meeting, when I didn’t use the right medical term for a body part, or by a scientist who specialized in aging research who caught me out for uninformed questions. Or maybe he was just a jerk!

In my 50s, having long left journalism behind me, I joked to friends that now I’d actually be a much better interviewer, not just because I’d become more curious, but also because I’d become more skeptical — and more confident.

As a medical reporter, I flew to Germany with a military medicine team practicing setting up a field hospital. Then I traversed Vienna on my own, not speaking a word of German, and Cairo, not speaking a word of Arabic.

It’s good to be goofy

As I entered my 40s, the impulse behind the Little Green Sprout costume re-emerged. I began to let my sense of humor and inner child out. It was freeing.

Once I hit my mid-40s, I let out my inner child, at the beach and at an art workshop involving paper and wire sculpture.

Curiously, along with letting down my hair, so to speak, I became more confident overall, and I can see it in my body language. The “pleasing” smile and dangling arms were replaced by serious expressions and power poses. It’s as if I decided, without being conscious of it, that despite being a woman, I can be goofy when I want and serious when I want, and I don’t need to please anyone but myself.

As a result, I have a more open life, weaving together the joys of deep decades-long friendships with the pleasures of more casual friends from group and volunteer activities. Retired, I no longer need to worry about battles to pick at work or about presenting a certain look, about wearing make-up or hiding my political leanings, about whether something will look good on my resumé.

Talk about power poses! “Here I am, world. Deal.”

The turtle emerges

Like the turtle who protects itself by drawing into its shell, that’s what I did. I think the extroversion was always there, but it took several decades of taking on and overcoming challenges — plus the wisdom of aging — to gradually poke out my arms and legs and finally my head. Not a change, perhaps, but an emergence. A perfect case study for psychologists to puzzle over, if they could go back and test 18-year-old-me!

A toast to friends and a more confident self. Cheers!

See other stories in this series

[embed]Snapshots of Life Through Photohaiku A series of stories based on a 100 Day Projectchrisaraymond.medium.com