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So there’s a name for people like me: Otroverts
After years of slotting myself somewhere between shy and selectively sociable, there’s a new label that has offered clarity about my own quirks.
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The writer, who enjoys solitude and has described herself as "an introvert with flashes of extroversion", has since discovered that she is an otrovert, with no sense of belonging to any group or identity.
ST PHOTO: TAN DAWN WEI
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For a while, I smugly thought I had figured myself out after landing on a self-characterisation that felt both precise and agreeable: I was “an introvert with flashes of extroversion”.
At first, I wondered if I might be an ambivert – the middle-child between introverts and extroverts – but I soon realised I lived much closer to the wallflower end of the spectrum because nothing drained me faster than parties, networking, or any gathering involving name tags. And I was faking extroversion whenever I felt compelled to put on a brave outward face.
