The Ambiversion of a Butterfly
Social personality types and butterfly physiology.
We humans, with our varying degrees of gregariousness, can learn much from the colorful molting of a butterfly, its looping flight paths, its romanticized metamorphosis, and the survival techniques it employs, as we each figure out our place in our respective social stratum. Part of our being a member of this community called Planet Earth™ is seeking connection and feeling a part of something, and as a butterfly pollinates its dominion of flowers so, too, must we cultivate our patch of friends. Though our methods may differ, person to person, or social butterfly extrovert to cocooned introvert, kinship and camaraderie are necessary elements of the human experience.
Butterflies serve as centerpieces in educational media and the arts and were once seen as symbols of mystery and superstition. Their moniker may stem from the dark age notion that butterflies were witches in insect form, out to steal peasants’ milk and butter. Butterflies, unlike humans, don’t stratify themselves socially. The term “social butterfly” alludes more to the insect’s propensity to flit from flower to flower, just as an extroverted individual might hop from party to party or person to person.
A bout of hermitism struck me at the onset of high school; I had been a curious, energetic, and affable kid prior. Picked on for my stature (short prince Stoph), my mixed race, or my expansive knowledge of the Starcraft: Brood War canon, I was ostracized by bigger, straighter, normie-er students. It was markedly easier to keep my nose in fantasy novels during lunch, kept companion by Robert "Bobby" Pendragon (y’all remember these jawnz?), and avoid navigating the dramatic complexities of the school’s social scene. I remember feeling forlorn, believing I had nobody to talk to, while determining the least-trafficked route to travel between class. I spun tales of upcoming social gatherings to my family, assuaging concerns that I was playing too many video games and not getting into enough trouble. So as to not exaggerate the solitude, it bears mentioning that I did have my bois, Mitchell and Max, who I spent my acne-riddled years cruising around Southeastern Pennsylvania with, bleating along to emo hits and going on late-night Wawa runs. But neither of those two went to my school, and in my day to day I had formed a cocoon and, for a time, lost contact with the world beyond my protective casing. I felt unworthy of perception, choosing to outright inhibit socialization in a teenage maelstrom of hormonal self-pity. Like a caterpillar undergoing radical transformation within its chrysalis, I was unaware that I’d eventually emerge with new colors and a new calling.
In this, the social reject, an unassuming caterpillar, metamorphoses into a social butterfly - or, to walk along the Jungian spectrum, this here introvert attempts to become an extrovert.
There’s a growing school of thought in psychology that posits the potential for a person’s Big Five (personality traits) to fluidly change over the course of their life, rather than taking root and remaining static as we age (the latter the prevailing belief among psychologists in the 80’s). In 2015, Nathan Hudson and R. Chris Fraley of the University of Illinois published a study suggesting that adult personalities aren’t as rigid as we once thought; they can be consciously changed with time and volitional behavior. The jury is still out on this one, but their results skewed positive and “suggest that people may be able to change their self-reported personality traits through volitional means, and represent a first step toward understanding the processes that enable people to do so.”
Whether trauma violently uproots and warps one’s once-placid self-image like a rock thrown into a tranquil pond, or a romantic relationship opens up a newfound conscientiousness in one partner, our personalities can morph based on our circumstances. We humans have a tendency to get down deep into our grooves; behavior patterns (destructive or otherwise) set in over time, social batteries drain faster, and so on and so forth. Personality change ain’t easy - it takes both motivation and a consistent set of new behaviors that can help one reach their change goal (ex. an introvert attending more social events to practice being extroverted). From curious and friendly to cautious and callous. From sensitive to confident. And from introverted to extroverted, and back and forth, forever and ever. Ya dig?
Some may argue that these shifts in personality are only temporary, citing the very legit Free Trait Theory, coined by Professor Brian Little, which details our capacity to briefly escape from our own innate personality traits for the sake of a project or for another person. However, more recent research has found that many people actually wish to change their personality traits, and might even be successful in doing so - it just takes a bit of mental elbow grease.
Citing a listicle, to me, is straight asinine, but I found the pro/con approach of this article effective when comparing introversion and extroversion. Psychotherapist Laurel Steinberg claims that introverts have a tendency to turn inward to grapple with negative feelings. As a result, they “might ruminate or dwell on unwanted emotions, rather than seek help coping with them”. For me, a pipsqueak of a high school student, solitudinous feelings wrapped me up in a ruminative cocoon, within which I came to the conclusion that the only way out of loneliness was the complete opposite of loneliness.
I moved to Rochester for college, far from the familiar cocoon of home, and my chrysalis split open immediately upon arrival. I emerged, feeling, surprisingly, safer in this new and unfamiliar place, a blank page upon which I could draft a new narrative for myself. I made sweeping changes to my appearance and wardrobe. I slicked my formerly tousled hair back with grease. I developed a habit for living beyond my means, spending an entire internship’s worth of pay on Saint Laurent jodhpur boots. I swung the social pendulum entirely in the other direction, with little regard for how I’d feel about myself on the other side. Yes, volitional personality change is possible but it comes on slowly, with intention. I, on the other hand, was redlining auf der Autobahn.
Employing camouflage, mimicry, and aposematism (the advertising by an animal to potential predators that it is not worth attacking or eating), nature’s prettiest pollinators are exceedingly fragile creatures, prone to many a parasite and brazen predator. High fashion and high-maintenance hair were my butterfly aposematism, manifested. My first foray outside the cocoon saw me ascribe my self-worth to the approval of others, believing that to be my best chance for survival.
Fostering lasting connections and collecting Instagram followers are two vastly different ideals.
After a fruitful visit to the freshman club fair, I began DJing at the college radio station. From the inquisitive poetry of Dan Bejar’s Destroyer to the lush rhythms and intricate lyrics of Frances Quinlan of Hop Along, from all the rock n’ roll greats on vinyl, to local, crusty punk acts, the lot of us spun indie sounds to the denizens of the greater Rochester area. This afforded me a core group of friends. I relished this newfound sense of fulfillment and mental stability. In a study facilitated by Social Science & Medicine, researchers established a relationship between a sense of community belonging and mental health, finding that across all stages of life, human health (both mental and physical) suffers when one’s sense of belonging is poor. I ingrained myself into this radio group, feeling like I did indeed belong. These friends moved to New York City in tandem after graduation, and our patch of flowers was transplanted.
I molted into somewhat of a social butterfly at this time, flitting from one acquaintance to the next. After moving into a 4-roommate apartment in which my best friend and I lived in the moldy, oft-flooded basement, I would do everything I could to stay out of the building, filling my schedule with events, meetups, hangouts, drinks, dinners, shopping, ad nauseum. The city’s boundless energy and the tenured social butterflies I’d meet in my travels struck me as effective blueprints for me to develop my own wings. I pasted over my natural instincts in a headstrong crusade to make friends, yearning for belonging.
In each new person I’d meet, whether I knew them for one minute or one month, I would force a friendship to bloom without even having shared a drink, a cry, or a deep belly laugh. My heart was left perpetually unguarded, crushed when these short acquaintanceships or romances would fail to actualize. In some cases, I’d been taken advantage of or would come to find that my feelings were unrequited, time and energy invested into a dead end. My flight path was driven by an incessant need to land on new flowers, rather than pollinate and promote growth among familiar fields. Fostering lasting connections and collecting Instagram followers are two vastly different ideals.
“If our life plans or even just short-term goals are guided by external criteria…without a true understanding of what it is that we actually want or what fulfills and satisfies us, then we end up at minimum disconcerted and unhappy, and at worst, with a midlife crisis or severely depressed.”
Dr. Risa Stein, psych prof at Rockhurst University
This lifestyle exhausted and depressed me. I wasn’t explicitly an extrovert, but I didn’t necessarily want to stay as introverted as I had been. A social butterfly I became, but one at odds with its own nature. I found that I would mistakenly double-schedule catch-ups with separate “intimate strangers”, and have to uncomfortably apologize to both parties involved. I would never admit to either that I’d overbooked myself so profoundly that I had made separate plans to meet each of them at around 7pm on opposite sides of Manhattan. Steinberg summarizes this plight. “While extroverts may have many friends, these relationships may not feel as strong, simply because they have so many connections to keep up with.”
I found it increasingly difficult to confront people or disagree, and I camouflaged my thoughts and beliefs to whichever shade I felt best jived with the person I was interacting with. I began to lose my sense of self, my preferences and wants waylaid in pursuit of palatability. How strange that my political views mimicked whosoever’s I found myself with. How quaint that my meticulously-curated looks helped me blend right in with the SoHo fashion geek crowd (lol at this). I believed that if I could cultivate a conventionally cool exterior, I could make enough friends that I’d never have to revert into my cocoon again.
Butterflies and plants have long participated in an evolutionary tango, co-evolving to depend on one another for survival, like the Fender’s Blue butterfly, which depends entirely on the Kincaid’s lupine flower for all its sustenance and shelter. What this butterfly takes from a flower, in food and housing, it gives back by way of pollination.
But butterflies, in actuality, are ineffective at pollinating. In this task, their physiology often works against them; a butterfly's long tongue allows them to gorge on nectar much better than collecting pollen. Pollination, to them, is almost an afterthought, carrying trace amounts from flower to flower and perhaps brushing it off on another in pursuit of its nectar. Many species of butterfly, then, in their short life spans, exist primarily to convert plant material into food for other animals.
Ambiversion — a term likely coined by Kimball Young in 1927 - refers to a mix of introvert and extrovert behaviors and preferences. An ambivert can take solace in the dear friendships that they have already fostered, and allow themselves to feel fulfilled by them. They can also make new friends without gambling their self-worth on the outcome. On this middling ground of the social personality spectrum, we humans can socialize as we’d like to, with wings as bright as we’d like, or cocoons as hardened as feels comfortable.
Wait, you ask, so the actualization of this complicated butterfly parallel you’ve been trying to cast is that we’re supposed to do what works for our nature? In this case, nurture ourselves so we can better nurture others? Do we pollinate or do we drink the nectar and move on?
Howsoever we choose to identify, we ultimately fall somewhere along a spectrum - it’s not just butterflies or caterpillars - we can be either, and everything in between, all at once. Over time, I came to balance elements of both traits, and appreciate both new and old flowers; cross-pollinating as an ambivert, if you will.
Yes. Ambiversion is the flower I landed on, but every now and then, I still get carried away on my monarch wings.
So it’s also probably not your job to pollinate every flower you see, but if you want to, go off social butterfly, and flap those wings. Just know that you can always come back to familiar fields and flit amongst the daffodils, nurturing not only your closest people, but yourself, in the process.