I thought I was just introverted—but then I admitted these 9 things to myself and realized what I really want is connection

I used to think I was just introverted. I needed a lot of alone time. I found large groups draining and small talk exhausting and the whole apparatus of maintaining an active social life more effort than it was worth. The label fit well enough that I stopped questioning it.

What I didn’t examine—for a long time—was the gap between how I described myself and how I actually felt on Sunday evenings. The particular quality of that loneliness. The way I’d decline an invitation and feel relieved and then, a few hours later, feel something else that wasn’t quite relief anymore.

I told myself it was just introversion doing what introversion does. And some of it was. But some of it was something else—something I’d been using the introversion label to avoid looking at directly.

The admission, when it finally came, was: I wasn’t someone who didn’t want a connection. I was someone who wanted it and had built, for reasons that made sense at the time, a very convincing case for why I didn’t need it.

Here are nine things I had to admit to myself before I could see that clearly.

1. The relief I felt after canceling plans wasn’t always pure relief

There was a version of it that was genuine—the exhale of an obligation lifted, the pleasure of an evening returned to myself.

But underneath that, if I was honest, there was sometimes something else. A flatness. A quiet awareness that the evening I’d reclaimed was going to be spent alone in the same way I’d spent the evenings before it. The relief was real, and it wasn’t the whole story.

I’d been treating the relief as confirmation that I’d made the right call. It was partly that. It was also a feeling that didn’t have a clean name—something between loneliness and the stubborn refusal to admit to loneliness.

2. I was actively avoiding connection, not preferring to be alone

These are different things, and I’d been treating them as the same.

Preferring solitude means genuinely wanting to be alone—finding it restorative, satisfying, and sufficient. Avoiding connection means choosing to be alone because the alternative feels risky or effortful or too likely to end in disappointment.

One is a preference. The other is a protection strategy. And when I looked honestly at the specific decisions I was making—the invitations I declined, the conversations I kept shallow, the friendships I let thin out without doing anything to stop them—I found more of the second category than I’d admitted to myself.

3. I’d decided connection wasn’t for me before testing whether that was true

I’d concluded, based on limited evidence, that the kind of connection I actually wanted wasn’t particularly available.

Not consciously. Just as a working assumption that had never been examined. The assumption shaped my behavior—keeping things surface-level, not reaching out first, not showing enough of myself to give people anything real to connect to—and then my behavior confirmed the assumption. Of course, connection feels unavailable when you’ve structured your social life to prevent it from arriving.

It took an embarrassingly long time to see the circular logic there.

4. The people I envied weren’t extroverts, they were just known and seen by others

I noticed it at a party once, watching two people talk in the corner in the particular way of people who actually know each other. Not performing knowing. Not maintaining a friendship out of habit or proximity. Actually present with each other, following a conversational thread that clearly had roots I wasn’t privy to.

I felt something sharp and recognizable watching them. Not envy of their social ease—I’d genuinely never wanted to be the person working the whole room. Envy of the specific thing they had with each other. That particular quality of being known. I filed it quickly and moved on, but I remembered it. It was data I wasn’t ready to process yet.

5. I used the word “boundaries” to describe things that were actually walls

Boundaries and walls serve different purposes.

A boundary says: here is where I end and you begin; here is what I need in order to be okay. It’s a limit that allows genuine closeness by making it sustainable.

A wall says: I’m not going to let you close enough to hurt me. It prevents intimacy rather than enabling it.

I had been calling my walls boundaries for years. The distinction between them was uncomfortable to sit with—because it meant that what I’d been telling myself was self-protection was sometimes something more like self-imprisonment. The same structure that kept people out was also keeping me in.

6. Real connection means being uncertain, and that bothered me

Real connection requires not knowing how it’s going to go. It requires saying the real thing and not knowing how it’ll land. Reaching out first and not knowing if the reach will be met. Being seen without knowing whether what gets seen will be accepted. That uncertainty is the price of admission for anything genuinely intimate—and I had, somewhere along the way, decided the price was too high.

It wasn’t introversion that made me avoid the uncertain moments in relationships. It was something older than that. A risk assessment that had been installed before I understood what I was losing by running it.

7. I’d been waiting for connection to arrive without creating the conditions for it

The version of connection I wanted was the kind that appeared without effort or exposure.

The friendship that deepened naturally without me having to say anything vulnerable.

The relationship that felt safe before I’d done anything to establish safety.

The intimacy that arrived fully formed without the awkward, iterative, sometimes-uncomfortable process of actually building it.

That version doesn’t exist. Connection is built, not discovered. It requires showing the real thing, repeatedly, and finding out over time whether it gets received. I’d been waiting for the version that skipped that process—and the waiting had started to look, from the outside, like not wanting it.

8. I was more afraid of being known than of being alone

The loneliness of being alone is a clean pain. There’s nothing complicated about it. You know what you don’t have and you know why, and there’s a kind of straightforwardness to it that’s almost easier to sit with than the alternative.

The loneliness of being with people and still feeling alone is more complicated. It points at something specific—something about what’s being withheld, or what’s not felt safe to offer, or what part of yourself has been kept back long enough that being seen feels more frightening than being lonely.

I was choosing the clean pain over the complicated one. And calling it introversion.

9. What I actually wanted was someone to get to know me and still want to stay

Not lots of friends. Not a full calendar. Not even connection in the abstract.

Something much more specific—the experience of being fully known by another person and finding out that they stayed anyway. That the real version of me, unmanaged and unedited, was something someone could receive and choose to remain present with.

That’s not an introverted desire or an extroverted one. It’s just a human one. And the years I spent calling myself introverted to avoid wanting it hadn’t made me want it any less. They’d just given me a tidy story that kept me from having to risk finding out whether it was available.

It is. That’s what I didn’t know yet.

Editor’s Note: This piece is part of our “As Told to Bolde” series where we share personal stories from individuals we have interviewed or surveyed. For more information on how we create content, please review our Editorial Policy.