The Introvert Meets the Extrovert

On Friday afternoon, I had signed up to attend the monthly resident assistant service trip.  This month we went to the Southwest Virginia Food Bank.  I heard stories last year about resident assistants who went on this trip and met a guy there named Mr. James.  They told the rest of the staff that he was incredibly outgoing and told a lot of stories.  I had no idea what I was in for.

As many of you may already know or have figured out, I am quite an introvert.  This does not mean I cannot do public speaking or hate people -- I simply feel more like myself when I am alone.  I get exhausted when I am around people for extended periods of time.  And if someone is loud and in my face, I get uncomfortable quickly.  This doesn't mean that I think these people are bad people -- I simply can only take them in small doses.

So after some of the resident assistants left the interview for a new residence learning coordinator, we piled into the graduate assistant's car and headed over to the Southwest Virginia Food Bank.  We checked in with the receptionist and waited for a guy to come get us.  Once he arrived he led us to the volunteer room where we watched a "tedious" (his words, not mine) video about what we would be doing.  The guy was friendly and tall, but not overbearing.  He left us to watch the video and said that James would be in at some point to herd us to the correct location.

James arrived quietly.  I heard the door open behind me and then the small fridge by the door.  A soda can hissed as the tab was popped and the feet of a chair dragged on the linoleum floor.  The video played on.

When the video was ending, Mr. James got up and came to the front of the room.  He looked a little bit like a smaller version of Michael Clarke Duncan.  On his purple sweatshirt was some slogan having to do with God being the music of his life and a rainbow of musical notes and piano keys.  He prefaced his talk by saying that we had never met anyone like him and never would again.

He was right.

Mr. James spoke quickly, loudly, in bursts of pure energy and enthusiasm.  He talked about how much he loved people.

"I don' care if you bla', whi', whatever, I jus' love people, and there ain' nuttin' you can do 'bout it!"

He clearly loved his job and loved helping people.  While some of the girls in the group received this well, two of us are pretty extreme introverts and withdrew a bit.  We gave each others looks frequently throughout our time there.

Mr. James and the Hollins ladies of HRL.

When we were done sorting food for the day, Mr. James came out in a yellow t-shirt.  Earlier he had said he was going to change shirts.  He had two colors to offer and mentioned one of them was yellow, his favorite color.  Trying to be social, I told him my favorite color was yellow, too.  He wore the shirt, he said, for me.  We then took individual pictures with him before he took us on a tour.  One room had literally hundreds of pictures of him with other people, the same huge smile (which I now knew he achieved by laughing whenever a picture was taken).  He was particularly proud of the two pictures of him with Sheryl Crow.  When he took the group picture, he insisted we point up at the picture of them so he could show her the picture and tell her what big fans we were of hers.  (I'm not sure what gave him the impression we were big fans, but whatever suits him.)

Soon after that we left.  I declared in the car that I would be going directly to my room and staying there for the rest of the night so I could avoid interaction with other people.  I had had my fill of people for the day.

I'm not really telling this story to make a point, per se.  I'm telling this story just to tell it.  People who have so much enthusiasm for life, like Mr. James, are special people.  I appreciate them and sometimes envy them.  But at the end of the day, I'm glad to be me, even if I am a bit of a hermit-recluse sometimes.

If you need me, I'll be under my rock.

Feeding America image courtesy of Gilmore Shows.
Group picture of James Andrews' Facebook page.
Introvert cartoon image courtesy of Lindsay Buroker.