Our theme for the month of March is “I was wrong about.”

I can remember the first time someone asked the question: late freshman year, in the dining hall. Ian from down the hall was shoulder to shoulder with me as we weaved through people and tables to the food lines. I greeted someone as I passed them. Ian turned to me and asked, “Do you know everyone?”

Pause. Freeze frame. Rewind.

I’ve said, more than once, I didn’t have a good time freshman year of college. Developing a social life in a new environment is hard, as I learned firsthand. By mid-October, I’d committed enough social faux pas that for the rest of the semester, I threw in the towel. Wake up. Go to class. Eat. Return to my dorm. Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. People tried to break me out of my seclusion: my roommate Mitch let me know whenever he headed to an off-campus party, my RA Miles invited me to group outings. I refused Mitch’s invites and floated on the outskirts of group outings. By the time I headed home for Christmas break, my most constant companion was Mitch’s Xbox.

If you’d told me in December 2016 I’d have a solitary first semester of college, I wouldn’t have been surprised. I was an introvert, I thought. My main hobbies were reading and creative writing, one-man endeavors. In high school, I had friends, but I preferred working solo on schoolwork, and if I didn’t have the same lunch period as my friends, I shrugged and cracked open a book.

So I was surprised at how dreary my inadvertent hermitage was. I realized I wanted to go to parties, high likelihood of putting my foot in my mouth be damned. I wanted to participate in group outings, not stay on the sidelines waiting to pull an Irish goodbye. I realized my mistake: I’m not introverted; I’m the least extroverted of four very extroverted siblings.

My older sister Chloe has always been the social one between the two of us.

My younger brother Zion is quite charismatic, the kind of person people have in mind when they say, “Be yourself.”

My youngest brother Ezra was quite the performer when he was little. Nowadays, he’s a literal performer: he goes to a performing arts high school and plays in two different bands.

And then there was me, the introverted one. Or so I thought.

I realized, as I brought my self-imposed exile to an end, that while I don’t have Chloe’s people skills, Zion’s charm, or Ezra’s affinity for the spotlight, I am a people person. I went to a small high school: 114 students in my graduating class, about 500 students overall. Seeing how I’ve always been good at remembering names, I wasn’t necessarily friends with everyone, but I knew most people by name, which went a long way. And that’s the way, uh huh uh huh, I like it, uh huh uh huh.

Calvin (according to Google) has a student body seven times the size of my high school. As I emerged from my hermit hole and gave this social life thing another try, I felt myself joining into familiar dynamics, despite the larger population. At a school of 500, there are few degrees of separation. People you haven’t met are classmates or teammates or siblings or cousins or boy/girlfriends of people you do know. Calvin, despite its bigger size, had similar dynamics thanks to so many local kids in the student body plus Dutch-American interconnectedness. (Despite not having a drop of Dutch blood in me, I got very good at Dutch bingo throughout my student years.) It took a lot of pressure off when it came to meeting new people, knowing we already had some kind of social connection and I only needed to figure out what it was. On top of my head for remembering names, I used association to keep track of people I knew:

Cross-country connections: Matt, senior on the cross-country team → older cousin of Jack, my suitemate → also older cousin of Delia, who I met one day eating lunch with Matt; Jena and Hope, two sisters on the women’s cross-country team → cousins (and look-alikes) of Lexi, my buddy Rob’s girlfriend → also cousins of Benji, my study abroad classmate.

People who went to high school together: *deep breath*  Jack, Breems, Muddy, Jelz, Ben, Sarah, Tori, Emily, Maddie, Abby, Nolan, Justin, Charlie, Kate, other Abby, Emma, Bergie, Luke, Maria…

Katie, John the Baptist, Caleb, Destiny, Emily, and Cailynn are all in engineering. They study together in the dorm conference room a lot of nights. I should probably let them know I have aspirin and a stress ball in my room if they need it. 

It worked. (Putting myself out there, not sliding those engineer kids ibuprofen; there’s no cure for that headache.) Like high school, I couldn’t (and didn’t want to) be everybody’s best friend, but I knew a lot of people casually.

Fast forward. Play.

I don’t remember how I responded to Ian, probably by explaining in a sentence or two how I knew the person I’d greeted. Ian wasn’t the last person to ask me some variation of “do you know everyone?” during my time at Calvin. My boss at my maintenance job asked me once when I struck up a conversation with a girl whose apartment we serviced. My sister said as much when she visited for family weekend and we went to the dining hall to eat lunch. When I went on a prayer walk with my buddy Rodney, he was incredulous when I knew seemingly everyone we came across.

Now in postgrad, I’m no longer in a community of 500 or 3,000. But now I know: introverts aren’t antisocial. (Mostly.) Even if I was an introvert, that means my metaphorical batteries are recharged by alone time. You’re still a human being if you’re an introvert, and no matter how much Western society force-feeds us rugged individualism, you need human connections.

So I was wrong about being an introvert on two fronts: assuming I was introverted, and assuming being introverted meant I’d be OK without human connections.

So to any introverts, shy people, or loners reading this, heed the words of someone who thought he was you: connect with people.

Who knows? You might get so good at making friends and acquaintances that people will wonder if you’re socially omnipotent.

Noah Keene

Noah Keene graduated from Calvin University in December 2021 with a major in creative writing and a minor in Spanish. He currently resides in his hometown of Detroit, Michigan. He spends his free time reading and putting his major to good use by working on his first novel. See what he’s reading by following him on Instagram @peachykeenebooks and read his other personal writing by going to thekeenechronicles.com.