Intra-Version
I tend to test something like 95/5 introvert/extrovert, and there's no question I am most in my element when I'm in my own head.
I am increasingly mindful of how self-consciousness, in all its sundry forms, can be a major blocker to making the context-switch when it's needed or wanted. The excellent self-question of "Do you have compelling evidence as to how doing X or making Y mistake has led to the brutal and decisive destruction of your life, moral rectitude, and/or capacity to experience joy?" is an interesting mantra to help grind down the imagined stakes of all kinds of interactions and everyday risk-taking.
I have a mild obsession with quarterbacks' mental composure in games. They throw an INT, then you just have to watch each one of them to understand how they've come to cope with it. You get the Eli Manning "that was definitely not my fault," but you also get sullenness, anger, dead-eyed passivity, etc. No matter the strategy it's a master class in something I don't think I could ever do.
It stuns me to see somebody fire up the ol' methane-fueled lamp in the wild, and so often to get away with it, while I'm over here second-guessing the thing I did right last month. Last year, even. Just the skill - and it is a skill - of kind of not caring at some point can feel pathological at even its lowest concentration, but it's more virtue than vice in small portions. It's something I'm working on. We're wells of compassion, except to ourselves. I mean, why have some mantra like "breathe and be grateful" when you can instead employ a salty "screw them and the horse they rode in on!"
In moments of progress in this area it does become clear exactly how fascinating people are, when you really let loose and just go with whatever situation you're placed in together. I was at a party several years ago where the hosts were so in tune with this truth that they appeared to me to consume personal uniqueness as it was offered up to them in conversation. With some additional hamming-up and facial prosthetics it could have been a Star Trek plot where the aliens ate emotions or memories or something like that. It was admirable, and endearing, and honestly a little weird. But I felt no shortage of welcome at that party, that's for sure.
Looking for a different Vonnegut quote to reinforce a different point, I coincidentally found: "Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.'" So it goes.