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.

- Tan Dawn Wei Senior Columnist

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.

I’m not socially inept; I don’t break out in hives when talking to strangers. But those “flashes of extroversion” only ever lit up when I felt entirely safe, like in the company of family or very close friends.