Introverts Can Express Themselves Beautifully Without Talking

Frequently, introverts can express themselves best in ways that don’t involve speaking. Sound like you? Go ahead—express yourself the introvert’s way.

One day when I was about 8, my dad ripped the aging, ragtag cupboards out of our kitchen and started building the new, matching set my mom had wanted for so long.

Over the course of a few weeks, we watched as Dad’s handmade, stained-brown creations slowly came to life.

By the time he was done, Mom had a spacious cupboard to the left of the sink, one to the right of it, another near the stove, and one in the corner, along with a smaller mini-cupboard right above the sink (not to mention three additional cupboards at floor level).

They were perfect.

But then we noticed something.

It’s All About Your Perspective

Dad was 6-feet-4-inches tall.

So when he’d installed the upper cupboards, he’d quite naturally put them at what, to him, was a normal height. He could reach the handles—and the top shelves within—easily.

Mom, on the other hand, was 5-feet-7.

So when she came along to test out the new cupboards, she discovered that they were—well, they weren’t exactly at eye level.

Not hers, anyway.

She couldn’t reach for the handles and shelves. She had to reach up to them.

Her reaction?

She loved her cupboards.

They were still perfect.

“I’ll Show You I Love You”

The cupboards’ height made no difference to my mom. She just adapted. (In her later years, she took to “reaching” cereal boxes on the top shelf by stabbing them with a 12-inch carving fork and pulling them down to her outreached hand.)

Mom loved her cupboards—and they were definitely her cupboards, not our cupboards or even Dad’s cupboards—not because they really were perfect, but because they were perfect to her.

And because they were the perfect way for my quiet dad to express his love for her.

Dad operated like this his whole life.

He wasn’t the verbal “I love you, Nancy” type. He was the nonverbal “I’ll show you I love you, Nancy” type—which meant that our house was filled with the things he had made for her: our kitchen table, our living room coffee table, the side table by his living room chair and the matching one by Mom’s, and his masterpiece: the “swinging bed”—an old mattress on a bedspring that hung from chains in our back-porch ceiling and rocked you to sleep during a summer rain.

My dad, like so many other introverts (and he was as introverted as they come), expressed himself best in a way that didn’t involve his mouth.

Introverts Can Express Themselves Best in Introverted Ways

Maybe you’re the same.

Maybe you, like my dad, gravitate toward building things.

Or maybe you’re into painting portraits … or shooting photographs … or playing music … or writing essays … or landscaping your yard … or restoring old cars … or whatever.

Go ahead.

Express yourself in your own introverted, words-optional way—the way that works for you.

It’ll be perfect.