I’ve never resonated with the extroverted/introverted personality dichotomy.

Carl Jung came up with extroverts and introverts, but after describing extroverts and introverts, he says this:

“There is, finally, a third group, and here it is hard to say whether the motivation comes chiefly from within or without. This group is the most numerous and included the less differentiated normal man . . . The normal man is, by definition, influenced as much from within as from without. He constitutes the extensive middle group, on one side of which are those whose motivations are determined mainly by the external object, and on the other, those whose motivations are determined from within. I call the first group extraverted, and the second group introverted.

Psychological Types by Carl Jung

So the person who came up with extroverts/introverts says that most people people are in the middle.

And that’s how I feel. Normal. Somewhere in the middle. I like being with people, and I’m get motivation and energy from other people. But I also like to be alone, and I get motivation and energy from myself too. Both.

We can become the stories we tell ourselves. So when we hear the story of being introverted and extroverted, we often choose one or the other and then we become that way. We think we are introverted, so we act introverted.

But we will learn and grow and change throughout out life. I thought I was introverted until being introverted was no longer a viable option to happiness–I had to make friends and be more outgoing to emotionally survive. So I changed.

My personality changes a lot with age, experience, and circumstance. I am not fixed. I change regularly. And so do you.

(Further reading here and here.)