Once again the internet conflates "introvert" with "crippling social anxiety/executive dysfunction".
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2026
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"Do y'all extroverts ever feel pressured to talk, flighty, and hypersexual after three hours of sleep?"
Ah, bipolar my old friend. How are you?
It's ok, I'm both!
I'm an introvert so conversation drains me and so I dread seeing the text message come in as I'm more than likely already over my social exposure limit, but my extreme anxiety about everything forces me to answer it almost immediately lol
What the fuck, are you me?
Oh God... This whole time I thought I was me but I'm not! I'm you!?
friend? I do this at work all the time, half my day is dealing with the consequences of not responding on time.
Or at all
I walked out of a 2-hr meeting Monday and on the way to my next meeting got confronted by a guy in the lobby for taking too long to schedule a meeting he had requested on Friday...
I have people schedule meetings on the same day. I mostly am not at my computer. 2 - 3 check ins a day typically. Then they get mad when i dont show up to a meeting i never accepted.
I also get people who apologize for a "late response" when its an hour later. Like wtf do these people expect
I work in a severely understaffed development department for a city. The entire city has fewer than a dozen employees, but we have MASSIVE residential houses (median new home over 5 million) thay are more complicated than most commercial developments. I coordinate all development, permitting, and inspections and am also the GIS departmentand web editor.
I currently have 200 major development projects in some level of review (plus the houses that have been permitted but take 3-5 years to build), and every fucking one of them wants to talk to me for 30 minutes every week about their project.
And then they bitch that my reviews take too long or that I'm hard to get on the phone.
Yes
Very yes.
Very very yes.
Immeasurably yes.
That's not introversion.
Then what is it?
Executive dysfunction
Very interesting. I didn't know about this and after reading a bit about it, it makes sense. I didn't know there was a name for this. Thanks for putting this on my radar.
Or:
Let me respond to that text my friend sent me the other day looks at phone and it's been 3 months
3 weeks? Try 6mo
Welcome to my adhd world
Only my ADHD homies understand. Everyone else gets very upset.
The longer you don't respond the more daunting it gets
I wish people just came and saw me in person
I appreciate the notification my messages gives me sometimes. I forget the exact verbiage, but it brings it to the top of the list and says something like, "you got this 1 day ago. Did you mean to respond?"
I will use that as a start to my text "hey my phone reminded me i didnt respond to this. So sorry!"
Ah good excuse! :D I'll save that
Wait, do you not?
I'm doing this right now
Yeah but only always.
Yes-ish. But for the record, I don't regard that as making me a horrible friend, as I do tend to go all out when I have the energy for it. Plus, I might not respond in a timely fashion to a picture of a plate of food from the dinner at Chez Broulez, but if my friends know if their car broke down in the middle of nowhere or they need someone to feed their dog b/c they had an emergency come up, that I'd be right over as soon as possible to help.
People know I'm often not timely with message responses
If they're not cool with that, they probably self selected out of being my friend
it's almost as if you should be friends with people who like you, and not friends with people who dislike you or whom you dislike.
when someone complains about how awful their friends are/make them feel, i ask them why they are friends then, and they usually tell me to go fuck myself. i don't think i've ever dated a woman who actually liked her friends, so much as hated them and just wanted them to be jealous of her.
Not anymore. My friends know that life sometimes gets busy and things sometimes fall in between the cracks. If they are truly friends, they know I'll come back eventually and if they are in a rush, they can msg again. To people who think they are entitled to an answer i apply the following principle: "I have no obligation to lower my car window for bums begging for money. Even if I know them personally."
No
No one texts me
Not even scams and advertisers?
Yes, but if the friend is a fellow introvert they understand.
Yeah that happens to me. I call it "getting a text".
Can't say it's never happened. It was a lot worse in my 20's. Social anxiety was bad.
Responding to a text you don't feel like responding to is just a chore that needs to be done. You respond, set a mental limit on back-and-forth banter, then hard stop it with an excuse when you're done. If you get into it and it's not taxing, go with it, if it's killing you, throw out i'll have to talk to you later and then be the bad friend :)
I'm in a group chat with a bunch of friends I've known for years. One day I see a message pop up asking if anybody has seen or heard from me. I hadn't messaged or spoke to any of them in over 6 months.
It was nice to know I was thought of but trying to explain why I often don't reply or join in was difficult.
I think you have the order of operations wrong here. You're excusing bad behavior by claiming introversion. That's just being shitty.
This type of behavior is usually caused by extreme social anxiety coupled with depression, ADHD, or some other mental health issue that causes executive dysfunction.
It's not "just being shitty".
You're the type of person to call folks not getting out of bed because of their depression "just being lazy"
Inb4 "no this is different"
Found the entie!
Can't speak for everyone, but oh absolutely yes, for me.
You get over the guilt. It's fine.