Sorry I’m late, I didn’t want to come

I wonder what Carl Jung would think about this

“Are you introverted or extroverted?” asked my boyfriend’s childhood friend, taking a sip of his flat white.

We’d been introduced only an hour before, which is maybe why this question made me feel more self-conscious than it should’ve. On the other hand, when people have always labelled you ‘the life of the party’, how do you explain that you’re just not anymore?

Given that he’d known me for all of about 45 minutes, I answered honestly. “I suppose I’ve always come across as extroverted, but I feel more introverted inside.”

“Ahh. Extroverted introvert,” he nodded, apparently satisfied by what I felt was a wishy-washy answer.

Hearing my new personality type defined out loud did nothing for my understanding of what it means or why things shifted in the first place. But even Carl Jung — the Swiss psychiatrist who first categorised humans this way — had the wits to know these distinctions were dubiously rigid.

“There is no such thing as a pure introvert or extrovert,” he declared. “Such a person would be in the lunatic asylum.”

Well, that’s awkward. There probably was a time when Mr. Jung would’ve loaded me onto the next bus to the loony bin.