What happens when you go from being sociable to being a homebody?

We tend to think of personality as something we carry with us everywhere we go, but much of it is shaped by the environments where we learned to exist. For example, moving to a new town or experiencing loss can dramatically change aspects of your personality you thought were immovable.

This is both relieving and nerve-racking. Knowing your personality traits aren’t set in stone can give you hope about the aspects you consider ugly (they’re not fixed; you can do something about them), but it can make you question whether an immutable essence really exists within us or we’re completely impermanent.

Finding peace within impermanence seems like a phrase found in a 5,000-year-old book from the Far East. Well, maybe they had a point.

I recently moved towns, and a lot of things changed inside me that I thought would stay the same wherever I went. We could argue that a personality trait is partly a relationship a person has with their environment. I think my old environment encouraged my sociability because, having spent most of my life there, I had many friends everywhere.

Now, in my new town, the only friends I have are the ones I made the (very) few times I went out, but it’s really hard to go out because I have so few friends. It’s a vicious cycle indeed. It’s hard for me because I never had this need. I’ve always been naturally sociable and curious, so everywhere I went, I made a new friend.

If you spend your entire life in one place, everything is really easy because, over the course of a lifetime, you naturally attend many classes, festivals, and bars and make friends there; so when you get to thirty years old, you have a lot of friends to choose from.

I basically switched towns and started from scratch. I never thought about how hard it could be to enter a social group in a big town. People have to casually take you to places where there are other people, and there you can (casually) make friends. I think this also involves the age factor because I’ve changed my priorities, and I’m not going out to drink on a Wednesday like I would’ve in my early twenties, when I met most of my friends.

I don’t necessarily consider myself an introvert, but I do curate my friendships; I’m very particular about shared interests and passions, and my interests aren’t the most mainstream. In my hometown, I had a long time to find friendships that met my strange criteria, so I went out a lot. Here, I’d rather stay home.

I tried making friends at the gym or at work, but no one does the trick for me; I’m not simply extroverted; I’m very picky. Well, this went from article to complaint.

What I mean is that being an extrovert or a homebody can be more influenced by your environment than you think, and I have to find a way to meet people ASAP, though I love my lonesome movie nights, lol.