Introvert's Outreach: Kristi Koeter

The 10-Questionnaire for Inward-Bound Creatives

I was delighted to launch my first Introvert’s Outreach edition—10 Questions for Inward-Bound Creatives—in recent weeks with fellow self-declared introvert, Andrew Smith of

Goatfury Writes

. You can find that first post here.

Now, thanks to Andrew’s recommendation, it’s time to pass the torch for Round 2 to Kristi Koeter of

Almost Sated

. (Note for my subscribers, these Q&As come in addition to my regular weekly posts—so consider this a bonus and sit tight if you prefer my usual mix of unique essays). I’m open to your participation; please reach out if you want to play along, krista@sleepyhollowink.com. Feel free to suggest questions and other ideal candidates.

Thank you to Kristi for bravely being game—and here we go:

Kristi Koeter is a marketing director and former newspaper journalist. She is co-author of the book Show Your Work and writes the newsletter Almost Sated about boldly embracing midlife while detoxing from diet culture. When she isn’t writing, you’ll find her mountain biking, hiking, or spending time with her family in Austin, Texas.

INTROVERT’S OUTREACH: KRISTI KOETER

1. How do you personally define “introvert”?

I define introvert as someone who needs time alone with themselves and their thoughts, someone who recharges from being alone.

2. How does being an introvert manifest itself in your life, and to what degree?

I really love my alone time and crave my alone time. Often the only time in the day that I’m truly alone, unless I go out for a walk or a bike ride, is the early morning, and I cherish this time. It’s when I do most of my writing, because I can be alone with my thoughts and really get into what I’m doing. Later in the day, there are so many distractions. 

I love people. I really do. And I need them more than I’ve ever needed them before. But I really only feel “right” when I have ample alone time. So I guess I deliberately schedule my life so that I’ve got a good balance of alone time, and then depending on how much interaction I have going on in my life organically or through necessity, I might “allow” more. 

Before the pandemic, I always worked in offices, and actually I loved all of the buzz and interaction I had working in the newsroom as a newspaper journalist. I think the thing about journalism is that a lot of the time, everyone in your part of the newsroom is doing the same type or work as you or focused on the same news event as you, so we were sort of all collectively in the zone at the same time. I also think I’m just really good at tuning people out, and in a place like a newsroom, that is totally OK, because everyone there understands the importance of meeting deadlines. 

After I left journalism, I moved to a startup kind of environment, and we were in small offices for most of that time, and that worked well, because I do better with just one or two people. But there were a lot of disruptions there, largely because the CEO liked to talk through ideas and just had a lot of manic energy, but that was OK because there was no urgency like I had as a journalist. When we moved to an open-office concept, I hated it. I felt like I was under a microscope and there was no private space, so if I had a conversation, I sort of had it with everyone in the room. 

After I left that job, I only took remote jobs, and I love being remote. Now, if I want or need people time, I can always go to a coffee shop, but I’m much more productive working remote, and as a mom to three kids, I love the flexibility of remote work. 

3. When did you first become aware that you’re an introvert?

I’m not sure at what age I first became aware of my introverted ways, or even knew what an introvert was, but I always felt “different” from the people around me. But it was different in a good way. Even as a young kid, I was intrinsically motivated and self-possessed. My parents and teachers never needed to tell me what I should be working on. I was very driven and determined to achieve my goals, and those things were more important than friendships and relationships. I was never that little girl who dreamed about getting married. I dreamed about being self-sufficient and having a fulfilling career, and then hopefully finding a life partner.  

When I got to my teens, I wanted to connect with people on a deeper level, and it seemed to me that the world was made up of a lot of people living shallow lives. I wanted to have friendships, but I was happiest having one or two people I really connected with versus a bunch of people I didn’t know very well. I wanted to live deeper, and I still do.

4. Do you take pride in your introverted status and/or is it something you struggle with?

I accept my introvertedness and understand how integral solo recharging is for my soul, but the older I get, the more aware I am of my otherness, and I see the downsides to it. There are days I kind of feel like an alien from another planet here on earth, because of the disconnect between myself and others, and how I think about things versus how I am perceived as thinking about things. About 10 years ago, I started hearing more and more that people couldn’t get a read on me. I was told I had a poker face, and I would hear, “When we first met, I thought you didn’t like me,” which was completely not how I felt about the person. So, I started realizing there is this disconnect between how I see myself and how I am perceived, and how I communicate and how my communication is perceived.

When I was a kid, my poker face was a survival mechanism. I didn’t want people to know how I felt or that I was capable of being hurt, which has less to do with introversion and more to do with trauma, but my introversion probably helped me mask more easily. As I’ve gotten older, people not being able to read me has become an obvious challenge. My kids have told me they didn’t always know I loved them. I mean, they knew it on some level, but they had trouble reading it through my words and facial expressions. 

So, some of that is being an introvert and some of it is a sort of adaptive survival mechanism, and some of it is because I’m also highly logical, more logical than feeling, and so I don’t always show emotion on my face. This is a problem when you have kids or manage people, which I did for many many years. I had to get better at expressing myself with emotions and feelings and less matter of fact.

With my kids, I don’t want them to ever wonder how I feel about them or to doubt for a second that I love them, so once I really became aware I had a problem, I began working on it. I really do have to work at showing facial expressions and be very deliberate, and it’s really hard when I’m tired or stressed.  

When I first met my husband, one of the things that drew him to me was that I didn’t behave like anyone he’d ever known. He was an engineer by education, so he was looking for patterns in my behavior, and I didn’t always behave in the ways that he’d expect. As a highly intelligent human being, he found this intriguing, but it came with a downside. He also couldn’t read how I felt about him, but instead of shutting down and slinking away, he actually let me know. And because of that, and because I really wanted him to know how much I cared about him, I went out of my way to communicate that. So a lot of our early courtship was about learning to speak each other’s languages, and I had to learn how to communicate with him in a way that he could understand. And now there are still times I will say and do things to communicate to him how much I love and appreciate him, and then I will check in again to make sure he understands. He gets me now, even when I’m not making extraordinary efforts, and that is a beautiful thing. 

5. How does being an introvert affect your relationships and social choices?

I covered a lot of how being an introvert affects my relationships in the previous question. With social choices, I do better in smaller group settings or one-on-one connections. I can work myself up in a big social setting and turn on the extraversion, but it takes so much out of me, and then I have to have more down time to reset. 

I took up mountain biking a few years ago, and it’s one of those sports you can do solo or with a group, or both. My sister, who is also a mountain biker but lives many states away, noticed I did a lot of solo rides and asked if I enjoy them. I told her I do, especially when I’m working through any kind of issue or trying to figure out how I feel about things. I love to do a solo ride and just be alone with my thoughts out in nature and see what comes up. I like group rides too, and for the introvert, group mountain biking rides are kind of perfect, because you’re out with people, but if you’re talking, you’re only talking minimally when you stop to catch your breath. Because I still crave deeper relationships, a group ride alone isn’t enough, but it’s a pretty good start. 

6. How does being an introvert impact and inform your creative life?

The work that I do requires a lot of concentration. Almost none of the work I do is mindless, so my introversion and ability to really get in the zone helps me. I can completely lose myself in work, and frequently do. This is my superpower, but it also sometimes gets me in trouble, because when I get in the zone, I have a really hard time coming back out to the real world. 

I can totally be in that other place and miss important details or conversations, especially with my kids, because they think nothing of interrupting me. So I’ve had to get better at telling people who approach me while I’m in the zone, “Hey, I need a few more minutes to finish this thing up and then we can have a conversation.” I am actively working to be present with people when they need me, but it’s challenging.

7. Do you think you’re a creative person to begin with, or a more effective one, because of your introversion?

First, I should say that I don’t consider myself a deeply creative person. I do create, but most of my work is practical or logical, although lately it’s been more of an exploration of feelings. I do deeply want to communicate with and connect with people, and I’ve always gravitated toward the written word. Even as a kid, I was writing plays and journaling. The latter was a means of self-discovery and manifestation. I was dreaming up what I wanted for my life to be. 

Also, as a teen, I would spend hours and hours riding circles around my street on my bike and doing that same kind of dreaming about my future or sometimes getting lost in these fantastic imaginary scenarios. 

As a kid, I didn’t know what I was doing had a name, but now I know I was going into a flow state. I still go into these flow states, but now I do them when I go for a walk or a bike ride by myself. And in these flow states, the ideas just seem to come out. I often write while walking, either physically taking notes on my phone or using dictation. I’m not sure everyone taps into themselves like this, and I’m really not sure how extroverts do it.

8. How do you navigate self-promotion as an introvert?

Oh, this is tough. I see most self-promotion as a necessary evil. The more personal the work I’m promoting is, the more difficult it is for me to promote it. I enjoy doing podcast interviews, because it’s about what I have to say versus my face front and center. I don’t really enjoy being on camera or in front of a camera, so I would prefer my social media to be about my work instead of me as a talking head. As a marketer, I see the value in self-promotion, but I’m working to find my happy place with it, where it’s more on my terms. 

The work that I do creating content takes so much of my energy, and often social media content that gets picked up algorithmically requires that it’s specifically crafted for that channel. So, to do it right, you’re often creating content purely for it to be seen on a particular channel, and I don’t like that. I want to share what I have to say, not create content so it will be seen on Instagram. I’m always striving to create things that have meaning and help others.

9. How do you strike a balance between requiring solitude/retreat to be creative and the desire to engage with the world that might inspire your creativity?

Well, as I get older, this gets easier, because I actively want to engage with the world, and I need the world! We seek a kind of balance in life, and I crave meaningful interaction and engagement, and I know that I have to put myself out there and do things that make me uncomfortable to get them.

10. Does your introversion ever get embedded as an actual theme or message in your creative output?

It has come up in small ways, because it is such a core part of my being. But also, just last week at dinner, my daughter brought up her Myers-Briggs profile (she is also an introvert), and I retook the test to see what I am (an INTJ-T, by the way). Then she told me to Google the INTJ’s “hierarchy of mental functions,” which I had never even heard of, but she’s a psych major and goes even deeper into the subjects that interest her. Anyway, it blew my mind, this hierarchy of mental functions, because I had no idea that there was an order to our mental functions, that they vary by personality type, and that the priorities of these functions shift as we get older. 

So as an INTJ child, I was unconsciously working to develop my dominant function, which is introverted intuition, but from midlife onward, the INTJ’s focus turns to extraverted sensing, which is living in the present and getting joy and purpose through interactions with other people and things. Reading that was mind-blowing, because it completely tracks with my experience.

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Thank you for your thoughtful reflection on these questions, Kristi! I’m a personality assessment junkie and fall in or close to the INFP corner they say. For those who want to know more on this Myers-Briggs stuff, here’s an overview. Want to do my questionnaire? Reach out and stay tuned for Round 3.