The Year I Became an Extrovert

2025 has been a really good year for me. I've been feeling much more confident in myself and my appearance and my work and everything else really. I also got to have some fun international adventures, all three of which were super social the entire time. I've identified as an introvert almost my entire life, so I expected these trips to be super draining for me, and I thought I would need a long recovery after each of them. However, I've experienced the opposite. Every time I come back from a trip, I feel super energized. I also started realizing that I gravitate towards social activities. I prefer group fitness and team sports to solo exercise. I try to hang out with my friends all the time, and I love making new friends. I like dating even if the relationships don't go anywhere because it's fun to meet new people and talk and do things together. Reflecting on these things has made me realize that I'm extroverted, and that all that time that I thought I was introverted was because I was unhappy with aspects of my life and I lacked confidence.

Since 2025 is ending, I decided to look back on my social activities throughout the year. I keep a very accurate calendar, so I was able to count how many social activities I did. I grouped them into group fitness (like Rumble boxing or running with friends), team sports (like volleyball and soccer), 1-on-1 hangouts, group (me and more than one other person) hangouts, parties, events, and dates. Then I calculated the average number of each of these activity types I do per weekday, and also how many per week. The calendar visualization below shows how often I did each activity type on each day. The taller the block is, the more I tended to do that activity type on that day. Then for each activity type, I highlighted (by making the blocks wider and more opaque) the N largest boxes where N is the average number of that type of activity I did in a week. I used Google calendar stylings since that's the tool I use. This calendar kind of represents my average week!

I'll provide some insight into why activities tended to happen on certain days. My group fitness is mostly on Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday because those are days with classes from some of my favourite Rumble instructors, and also because I often had volleyball scheduled on other days which clashed with Rumble. Speaking of, I did most of my team sports on Tuesdays because my volleyball team was scheduled for Tuesdays and we played together for nearly the whole year, and the second place is on Sundays because I had both intramural volleyball and intramural soccer on Sundays for much of the year. I guess that I hang out with individuals on Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday because I'm more free on weekends and I didn't have a lot of work meetings on Thursdays, nor did I have late night volleyball on Thursdays for the first 8 months of the year. Group hangouts happened mostly on the weekend because that's when most people were free, and the same logic can be applied to dates, which again tended to happen on the weekend. I'm proud of how busy I kept myself with social activities this year, since the people I care about and spend time with are probably the most important part of my life!