IPR TIMES

Interview with The Introvert

By John Turner

John Turner, the top reporter for the IPR Times

The ultimate purpose of this interview was to understand what it is like for someone who feels

like they are in a personality prison. For the privacy and safety of the interviewee we have

decided to keep them anonymous.

The interview started kind of out the blue and neither me nor the interviewee was prepared

beforehand. We talked about the source of their introversion and did they remember always

being introverted. After probing I found out that there was a time in their childhood that they can

remember being more happy, joyful, and confident. They were about 8 years old when they

remembered being that way. I asked was there any reason for the sudden change, but the

interviewee could not remember any incidents that stood out as being the cause. We then moved

on to talk about the social anxiety that they experienced on a regular basis. I asked what was it
that keeps you locked up in your personality prison. Their response was fear. Fear of the

unknown and fear of people letting them down again. They explained to me how it is difficult to

trust people because of all of the people that have let them down in the past. Many of the

statements that the subject brought up confirmed my initial hypothesis about how and why

people place themselves into personality prisons. The subject seemed to be shaped in a very large

part by the environment that they grew up in. After discussion I found that without the love and

comradery of their mother, they may have turned out worse by far. A very profound thing that I

learned about the subject was that they had used video games to change an aspect of their

personality and confront a longstanding fear. When questioned about the situation and upon

probing further I believe the subject came to a personal realization that they had used something

that had scared them and turned it into something empowering. Another interesting concept that

we discovered together was that they had trouble finding positive habits about themselves but

had no problem at all finding the negative habits about themselves. This interview was very

enlightening and really helped me to understand what it is like for people who are experiencing

being in a personality prison.