When you are an extrovert your soul
starves for the hum of human connection. As an extrovert I feel blessed because
I do not have to worry so much about the loyalty of a small group of friends to
find ways to keep me entertained. Although, I am not saying that I don’t want that in
life, I do. What I am saying is that I my soul do not thirst for quiet, but
instead the noise, the buzz of a thousand different connections, like the
center circle of a spiders web, feeling every single vibration, meeting it,
greeting it, and welcoming it as if it were a long lost cousin, that I always
knew existed, but couldn't prove until that moment. This is not a guise to
cover up some insecurity and it is not a one-hundred percent of the time thing.
I enjoy greatly the quiet, intimate moments between my wife and myself, but for
them to feed, there actually needs to be a peripheral connection, which can sometimes
be stifling and draining to my wife who is an introvert. Luckily for us both, I
am like a humming bird bouncing around from flower to flower, filling up on the
sweet nectar of different crowds and groups of friends, allowing those
connections to afford me the mental fitness to try to be the best I can be in
my marriage.
While
this thought was wondering through my brain it happened upon the words humming
and interconnectedness, which lead me to a reality that I believe is true
regardless of “rovertness.” When you are an artist, regardless of your medium
or mental fitness you are always tortured in a way. You struggle to bring to
life something that may not even be a full formed thought, but the simplest of
emotions, through mediums that are not linguist with set parameters and
meanings. Hell, even writers deal in the deadly arts of allusion, illusion,
illustration, and simile. Dancers become ninjas, taking a musical phase and
contorting meaning out of practical nothingness. Painters use the various
colors of the rainbow to awaken our neurons into understanding the deepest
thoughts behind the canvas, like a cook who has crafted the perfect stew, this
in and of itself an art. As a dancer I rejoice to move and feel the music; to
lead my partners to smiles and laughs that come from trusting someone they just
met, hoping that they will not hurt them, and the payoff of that trust. I am
lucky that as an extrovert I get double the soul high in a dance club, from
being around so many people and being able to enter into so many different
conversations, as well as the joys of telling who I am through my art, through
my passion, through what makes me hum. You can tell an artist is bearing their
soul to you when you see that smile that only comes when they are doing what
they do. When they see in another’s eyes that they get a little bit of who they
are in that moment and this happens regardless of if they are an introvert or
an extrovert. An artist is tortured to connect to the world, to the other
through mediums that are not always received, or allow for interpretation. We bare
our souls through our stories and leave a little bit of ourselves behind when
we leave a dance floor or the blacksmith shop. We are tortured, yes, but it is
a torture that I would not change for the world, it is one that I enjoy and
hope will lead me to new understandings of the world around me, to God, and to
the people in my life. I do not have to create a dance specifically for church
because when I dance and move I am talking to everyone around me about my day
and who I was created to be, which tells of the God who created me.
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