An Introvert With a Microphone

I am an introvert. Not the timid kind, exactly, but the kind who leaves the party a little early and feels the whole day in her bones afterward. Given the choice between a crowded room and a quiet one, I will take the quiet one every time. So the fact that I now host a weekly podcast strikes me, depending on the day, as either a small miracle or a very good joke at my own expense.

The podcast is called Real Ghost Chatter. Every week it carries a true supernatural story, one of those accounts people have whispered about and never quite explained away. There are ninety-two of them now, stacked up one behind the other. When I started, I did not picture myself still here this far along. Some days I am not sure I pictured myself getting past the first one.

Here’s what we quiet ones rarely hear. Having something to say and wanting to say it out loud are two very different things. I have always had the stories. I have been collecting them my whole life. What I did not have was any great desire to be the voice in the room. That felt like someone else’s calling, someone louder, someone who did not feel the weight of a full day the way I do.

You do not have to be loud to have something worth saying.

What changed was not my personality. I am every bit as introverted as I ever was. What changed is that I quit waiting to feel ready and started simply showing up. Each episode opens the same way: Welcome to Real Ghost Chatter. I’m Mary Ann Poll, and I’m so glad you’re here. And every week I mean it a little more than the week before. Saying those words into the quiet has slowly taught me they were true all along.

I think a great many of us are waiting to become the kind of person who does the brave thing. We imagine that one morning the fear will simply lift, and then we will begin. I have come to believe it does not work that way. You begin while you are still afraid. You begin as exactly the person you are, quiet or loud, tired or unsure, and you let the doing do the changing, instead of waiting to be changed first.

My stories are dark, or they seem that way at the start. But I have never told a single one to leave a person frightened. I tell them because in every one, if you look closely, there is a moment where the light pushes back. That’s why I keep at it, week after week, introvert and all. Someone out there needs the reminder that the dark does not get the last word.

So if you are the quiet one, the one who slips out early and thinks best alone, the one who is certain the microphone belongs to someone else, let me gently disagree. It may belong to you too. You will not feel ready. That is all right. The world is not asking you to be louder. It is only asking you to begin.

Mary Ann Poll is known as America’s Lady of Supernatural Thrillers. She wrote the six-book Ravens Cove Iconoclast series and hosts the weekly podcast Real Ghost Chatter. After more than forty years in Alaska, she now lives in Texas with her husband, two Shelties, and two tabby cats.