I spent last night thinking about why I love MinneWebCon and kind of don’t like being here at my giant education research conference, and made my realization: I’m a shy extrovert.

At MWC, most people know me, I’m part of the leadership of the conference, and I therefore feel kind of responsible to introduce people to each other, to make sure people are happy and having fun, and I know so many people that I leave invigorated and excited from all the sessions and the talk. One of my loves in life is connecting people to each other, and I’m glad to be able to facilitate that.

Here, you’d think I’d be similarly energized. But despite being in a sea of thousands of people, I’m pretty much alone. I see people I know about once a day–for dinner or in between sessions–but mostly I just bounce around by myself. That is not good for the shy extrovert, and there just aren’t enough equivalents to MinneWebCon me grabbing people and introducing them to other people to get all the stragglers connected. This makes a conference like this exhausting and the ideas just can’t compensate for that.

Yes, yes, I should just go introduce myself to people. But that means interrupting conversations between people or standing awkwardly like a third wheel. Ugh. Nightmare.

And thus the shy extrovert is born. Or exists. Or something.