The Energy It Takes to Be Someone You’re Not Is Unsustainable

You can try to go against your own introverted grain—and many people do. But in the end, it’s an unsustainable strategy.

When I finished my master’s degree in counseling in 1998, I accepted a job as a personal counselor and AODA (alcohol and other drugs) specialist at Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin, in the same office where I had done my counseling internship the year before.

I was surrounded by wonderful people there, led by the director of counseling and career services, George Heideman.

The people—especially George—were the one and only reason I took the job.

Because in my heart of hearts, I didn’t want the job itself.

I had spent the previous year, and the rest of my graduate school years, doing energizing career counseling, not taxing personal counseling—and certainly not AODA counseling.

I didn’t even drink, so the AODA part of the job was especially ill-fitting.

I wanted to be a career counselor. This job wasn’t that. But I took it anyway and tried to make it fit my introverted personality.

Bad idea.

Several weeks into the fall semester, my wife and I were sitting in our car in the grocery store parking lot when my world started spinning.

Literally.

As the World Turns

Everything was spinning, the way it spins after you’ve spent too much time on the merry-go-round.

This went on for a week.

Then another.

I wasn’t able to function, let alone do my job at Edgewood.

Finally, I went to the doctor. I was assigned to a young resident (i.e., doctor in training) at the University of Wisconsin Hospitals, and he was my age if he was a day.

In other words, he didn’t know jack—in my mind, at least.

Everything is spinning, I told him. And my heart is pounding. And my nerves are shot. And my back hurts like hell between my shoulder blades. And I can’t get off the couch.

“Well,” he began, “your blood pressure is 150 over 110.”

Then he decided to drive my numbers even higher.

“Have you ever been treated for anxiety?” the young doctor asked.

What I thought—but didn’t say:

“Listen, you young puke, I need a doctor here. Who do you think you are? I’m a counselor. I know what anxiety is! I’m telling you about physical symptoms and you’re yapping on about anxiety?! Do I look like an anxious person to you? Do I? Do I?!”

What I really said:

“No.”

He then asked me if I’d ever considered medication for anxiety, and once again I said—nicely—no.

“But I really don’t think anxiety is my problem,” I added.

A Spinning Life Is Unsustainable

He played along.

And over the next week, thanks to a variety of tests that Dr. Smarty Pants ordered, I learned that all of my self-diagnoses were wrong.

I was not having a heart attack.

I was not having a stroke.

I did not have colon cancer.

I did not have a brain tumor.

But my world kept on spinning.

And I kept not going to my job.

It was all unsustainable.

So two weeks after I first saw him, I crawled back to Dr. Perhaps I Misjudged You and said:

“You win. Maybe it’s anxiety.”

His reply?

“It’s depression, too.”

Fighting Yourself Is Unsustainable Too

So I started taking medication for anxiety and depression.

I started seeing a counselor for it all as well.

And slowly, I got better.

But …

I had to quit my job at Edgewood.

I couldn’t do it—as in couldn’t perform it and couldn’t cram myself into the role again 
without getting the same result.

I felt so incredibly bad for letting George and my other colleagues down, especially after they had all been so good to me and so patient with me.

But George told me something profoundly important that has since etched itself permanently in my brain—something that is now on my mind every day as I encourage introverts to stop fighting themselves and/or trying to change themselves and instead simply be who they really are:

“It takes tremendous energy to be someone you’re not.

Too much energy.”

George was—and still is—right.