My new mascot is a Victorian robot named Tik-Tok

There's a movie I loved as a child - a movie I still love, despite how cheesy and poorly aged it is. Return to Oz was produced in the mid-80s as a sort of B-movie sequel to The Wizard of Oz, and starring Fairuza Balk and no one else you've ever heard of.

The plot, in a nutshell: No one believes Dorothy when she says Oz was more than a dream, and in the turn-of-the-century Kansas, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry decide electroshock therapy is the way to deal with Dorothy's delusions. So Dorothy goes into this center for treatment, but there's a big storm, and yaddy yaddy, she ends up back in Oz, which lies in ruin.

Dr. Worley and the electroshock therapy machine. 

One of the characters Dorothy meets in the ruined Oz is a wind-up mechanical soldier called Tik-Tok. He needs to be wound-up every so often to keep functioning. He's got separate mechanisms for thought, speech, and action. Sometimes his action mechanism will wind down first, but he can think and speak. Other times his thought runs out first, but he can move and speak gibberish.

I feel like Tik-Tok tonight. And it occurs to me that he's the perfect metaphor for introversion. 

Jack Pumpkinhead: If his brain's ran down, how can he talk? 
Dorothy: It happens to people all the time, Jack.

After a long day at work, I came home and wrote a condolence letter to a friend. I found out over Christmas that his wife of several decades had passed away a few months ago. She was someone who had always treated me with kindness and respect, and I felt I should tell him how much knowing her had improved my life. 

Writing a letter like that is emotionally draining. But when I was done, I caught up on the phone with an old, dear friend. We hadn't talked in months, there was a lot to cover. It was wonderful to talk to her and learn about her life, but eventually, I started to feel like Tik-Tok. 

Like my capacity for speech had just run out. Now here I sit, filled with thoughts, but I don't have the energy to converse. Only to write. 

I'll go to bed tonight, recharge, and wake up ready to make small talk. Ready to go to coworkers with the many questions I have about projects I'm working on. Ready to smile and laugh and be charming, when possible. But tonight, that mechanism has completely run out of energy. 

Remember that - introverts like people just fine. But if you come across someone who's being surly and irritable whenever you try to talk to them, they may have just run out of steam. Chances are, if you leave them alone for a while, able to sit in silence or with headphones on, they'll wind themselves back up and be perfectly pleasant a little later. 

And as for Tik-Tok, everyone should watch Return to Oz. If only for this reason: