being quiet

I am by nature a very quiet person. I tend to speak when spoken to, and I generally detest jibber-jabber. When my professors ask me questions in class, I instinctively respond with a terse "yes" or "no," which puts me in stark contrast to my classmates who like to wax philosophical about society's injustices. If someone tries to force me to articulate myself beyond what I've already said, I become physically uncomfortable, which frustrates the other person and occassionally throws him into a fit of rage. I feel safe to share my opinions among friends, but even then, I favor one-on-one rants rather than mass tirades.

This quietness doesn't jive well with another quality of mine -- namely, the fact that things piss me off all the time. I didn't realize how incompatible these qualities were until last week. Without going into details, I spoke at an on-campus event, which garnered a lot of debate among the panelists. The next day, the moderator sent an email expressing certain opinions that I disagreed with. The opinions probably wouldn't have pissed me off so much if I thought they just came from the moderator, but I knew that these opinions also come from my school, whose tunnel vision sometimes hurts their students. Being generally passive agressive, I shot off an email to the panelists explaining each of my problems. For many, it was the most they had ever "heard" me say. "Why haven't you talked about this before?" they asked. The only thing I could think was, nobody ever asked me.

This is a really dumb attitude to have, be it in personal relationships or professional settings. This attitude is especially unproductive in the legal field, where attorneys are advocates who don't get paid to wait for someone else to prompt them. If I'm going to work for the little guy after school -- the person whose voice has gone unheard for so long -- I'll never get anything done if I can't even use my own voice.

I've considered trying to go the opposite direction and become the lawyer that we all hate -- brash, schmoozy, loquacious. But I'm afraid that people will see right through the act, which will only make me look like a massive tool and thus annoy myself. In between these extremes, I'm struggling to find a happy medium, as cliche as that sounds. I have a dreadful feeling that this medium doesn't exist, though, and I'll eventually have to choose one over the other. It's times like these that I think being a tall white man would make my life much easier.