The off-side of coming from a family trying to figure out the rules of a strange culture and a strange language, the inscrutable manners of Western Canada, was that expected graces, phrases, and mores were mysterious, difficult to access. That this is a common lacuna for immigrants is so obvious as to be redundant. We assume that newcomers want to “assimilate,” but learning to re-shape the face into an expression suitable to an alien and mysterious culture is never easy. And while my immigrant parents and siblings had a strong sense of who they had been before their migration, which seemed to give them courage in adapting to this new place, I felt for most of my childhood utterly baffled. Where we were, the rolling parkland of Alberta, was physically specific, but who we were and who I was sounded a different reverberation. Even as I turned that question over and over, a meditation on active participation in the world, I was mystified.
People’s secrets reveal themselves when they do not know they are being watched. As a determined watcher, I knew I could discover privacies just so long as I retained my own. I was learning to be a writer; I was also learning how to use shyness to advantage. There is nothing shrewd about this combination of gifts and liabilities—the gaze was my way of remembering every word and gesture. It became and still is my research method, how I gather material. Once I started school, I learned to stare less overtly, but I kept watching, my look sometimes earning me the enmity of those who caught me in the act. My attention is both a trait of the shy and a declaration, a means of constructing a story. As a practitioner of Hazlett’s observation that “Reading, study, silence, thought are a bad introduction to loquacity,” my education as a writer cemented my shyness early.
I know that I shouldn’t be shy. When my first novel was accepted, Leonard Cohen witnessed my contract.
The night before McClelland and Stewart planned to announce that Judith had won the Seal First Novel Award, I was told to present myself at a suite in the hotel in Montreal where I had been accommodated. I was 23 years old, utterly naive, as only a homegrown Albertan can be, and shyer than a lost glove. I had no idea of what I was in for, the whole wild publicity ride that the Seal Award would engender, but I had a gut feeling I was going to be buffeted around a bit, and on top of my innate shyness, I was nervous. I was right about the unpredictable experience—I couldn’t have been less prepared. When I walked into that hotel suite, I encountered a phalanx of serious men in suits, all executives from the different international publishers who had together contributed to the Seal First Novel Award. There were two disruptions in this rather formidable room, a beautiful Anna Porter and a man I’d met in university. I took a deep breath and focussed on them; they would help me to negotiate this introductory scrutiny. The legendary Canadian publisher Jack McClelland, charming, effervescent, took me around the room and introduced me. “Let me introduce you to—” and “This is—.” I remember only a few of the names. “This is Anna Porter.” I was made tongue-tied by Anna Porter’s unruffled elegance, her kindness. And then came the man I was sure that I had met in university, that I must have taken a class with. “And this,” said McClelland, rather like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, “is Leonard Cohen.”
If I had been shy before, at that point I almost melted into the floor. Here was the iconic figure of Canadian literature, smiling at me with a gentle beneficence that I could hardly credit. The purpose of that meeting was to ensure that I signed the contract before the press conference and announcement the next day; and yes, Leonard Cohen witnessed my contract. I was knotted with shyness, my eyes following the cursive of his long-fingered hand, a hand that I surely wanted to touch but was prevented from touching by a terrible self-consciousness. He understood, I like to think, offering me the reassurance of his familiarity as an aid to courage for the appraisal I was facing. We both understood that we were the shy ones at some orgy of identification, a trial to our shared self-effacement.
As my writing years progressed, there developed a deeper reason for this diffidence, the collision of private and public person and the magnetism of revenge that seems to attract itself to public figures. When you are a young woman, with early success, you earn, entirely without meaning to, currents of enmity. Like the writer who informed me, with no small hostility, despite the conversation’s happening twenty years after the Seal Award, that he had quit his job to write a novel that was supposed to win, and I had stolen the prize. Or like the man who came to a reading, sat in the front row and glared at me throughout, without blinking, then came up and informed me that his wife had left him because she had read one of my novels. One is helpless before such charges; there is nothing to say. Shyness becomes a shield, an escutcheon.
In 1987, I was asked by the Writers’ Guild of Alberta to serve as the writer/editor in residence at the annual Strawberry Creek retreat. One beautiful evening, a group of us were going for a walk, when I stepped from the porch into a concealed hole in the uneven ground and turned my ankle. The injury was sudden and serious. Orthopedists later determined that I had torn a ligament, but all I knew at that moment was excruciating pain, pain that literally had me crying and rolling on the ground. While several of the writers tried to help, one of them—and I do not remember who—ran into the lodge and came out with a camera in order to take a picture of me. With shameless glee, she announced that she was never likely to see me in that vulnerable state again. No wonder I am shy; when I am caught off-guard, someone is eager to exploit my exposure. Better to be inscrutable, to look unassailable, to conceal the tight bindings of hurt.
So yes, I wear a disguise, a disguise tough and forthright that does not compromise my inner bashfulness. Yes, I feel empathy, too much empathy, and I know it can trap me, mislead me, woo me into giving to other humans more than I should, pieces of myself that are better withheld. My duality hugs a dark shadow. I want to be gentle and understanding, and so I suffer the psychomorph’s dilemma, where I am all things to all around me, and underneath retain a raging shyness that wants to be anything but who I am and anywhere but where I am.
No matter what the analysts and their cohorts say, shyness is not a social anxiety. Shyness is not the same as stage fright. Shyness is not introversion. Shyness is not a synonym for awkward and does not equate to alienation. Shyness is a quiet place where we resist the lure of glib connection, facile communication, and the whole gaudy circus of humans competing for attention. I would argue that not enough people are self-conscious. And while I do not recommend feeling skittish, fearful, or mistrustful, caution, reverie, and melancholy are allies for the observant writer.
All communication is tactile; the shy person is one who is nervous about touch, that unexpected fracturing of the barrier between one human and another. We live in an age when the body is a self-contained entity, and to interrupt that force field is an act so bold it is almost breathtaking. Why are painful and shy connected? My shyness is not painful but a refuge, an inner ear, a still small centre that keeps me balanced.
Wariness too is underrated. The shy person does not want to tell you all her secrets. And if the shy are considered romantic, trustworthy, a bit plain, then let that designation stand. There is a secret world of shy: luminous, scant, light of foot, and graceful with silence, even strolling arm in arm with irony. Wine can be shy, although food is never allowed to be shy; and clothing should not aspire to be shy but demure. There are days when the sky itself has the shy, naked air of a face just washed of tears. Does grief exacerbate shyness? Is shyness a stay against chaos and surprise? The complexity of loss hovers here: every word we utter, every gesture we make, will vanish. In this age where all is ephemeral, fast-moving, and disposable, shyness and its withholding articulate the ceremonial, more formal side of engagement.
And so we practise our disguise, we shy extroverts. Blushing occasionally, we retreat behind our masks, the inviolable public personae we’ve constructed. We over-compensate, faux extroverts who work hard to cover what others invariably read as arrogance or unfriendliness. Umbrella people, we pl
ay gregarious so we will not be thought cryptic, reserved, impenetrable, stiff, arrogant, old-fashioned, standoffish, and silent.
I deploy protective coloration to conceal the fact that I am a terribly shy woman who would rather find myself alone in a room with a big-bellied chair and a good book than at a party filled with dazzling people. I’m more brooding owl than peacock. I’m a coyote in an urban park, lurking and alert. Still, I am no Blue Hamlet (a rare tropical fish that prefers to “hide among rock work or hover near the substrate”) or Shy Wallflower (Erysimum inconspicuum, an uncommon plant with pale yellow flowers, native to Alberta). My awkwardness partners with reticence in the dance of self-possession. And so I hold my shyness, collaborator and doppelgänger, close.
Secret Self
ELIZABETH GREENE
At ten, eleven, twelve, I carried her inside me,
close under my skin, like the blue layer under
grey outer eucalyptus bark.
I wrote.
She could jump and touch her toes, dive
from the high tower, laugh at parties
while I, left to myself, would lurk
at the edges, silent oyster, unsure if
it was safe to open.
She was the first
woman in Space Academy; I wrote her adventures.
She got me to Chile, said Yes, let’s go!
I huddled, neck-cramped,
through the dark twelve-hour flight,
less space than you’d give a corpse,
and not horizontal,
without screaming or throwing
my omelette at the snarky stewardess.
I drink in the astringent smells,
pine, eucalyptus, commune with the fig
matriarch with ripening fruit and shiny leaves,
coat more luxurious than mink, ten times as green.
She scrapes the bark and smells, thinks,
healing, sweet. Picks one. Eats.
I’m the one who wants to be the tree.
Disturbing the Universe
ELIZABETH GREENE
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
—T.S. ELIOT “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Panic at the party.
All those people animated, assured.
I can no more speak to them than plunge
off a cliff. I gulp,
afraid of inflicting boredom,
bristle silence,
like I’m watching a movie
I can’t step into.
I’m paralyzed behind
a wall, transparent, frozen, glass.
I know I’m all inner—
stressed, I curl inside,
watch but don’t talk,
try to become invisible
and succeed fairly well.
It’s in my horoscope,
all my planets below the horizon,
a complex inner life
that never quits,
but it’s hard to throw my thoughts
out into the world.
When I’m home,
or with a friend, or two,
or with a cat,
I uncurl
like a Chinese waterflower,
find my voice,
know, if I want, I can
disturb the universe.
On Mingling
JENNIFER HOULE
After William Meredith
I do what’s in character, I look for places
to interrupt you in your small talk
with a well-timed witty remark, or I look
for a place to sit down somewhere
with a book, or I find a plant to consider
and fuss the dry leaves from. I love
to do this, in any case. So it’s honest,
and it is so rarely that I find any need
to interrupt; and more rarely still that I should
start a conversation we couldn’t finish
given the small time, and the smallness
of our relation. Apertures are increasingly rare,
you know, although—it isn’t so much
that they’re expensive. It’s where
could they go? You don’t see screen doors
the way you used to, all the time. We want
sliding doors to all our balconies.
French doors. Double doors into
all the businesses. And maybe double doors
have led to the demise of chivalry—somebody
said that, once, to me, after the strangest
tussle in a vestibule. And I thought yes!
but have they bred a better reciprocity?
We did not agree, but married. Marriage
cannot be the fear? Its specter why
we are the way we are in the crowded rooms
we have bothered to enter, heads on
straight, and feeling hopeful? Screens
at the windows, see, but windows—
anyway, not what I really meant by
apertures. I was thinking more of the voids
we sometimes seem on hand to fill
so squarely it smacks of the fictive.
Too often, I stand on the outer edge
of a close-knit circle doing its philosophy
in self-correcting circles, like it does.
And, though I would like to trigger
a spiral, I stop, mid-wave, to scratch
my head, in case they don’t wave back,
and I stand on looking…intrigued
or askance: how else could you?
Good for Olivier
RONA ALTROWS
“WHAT PROJECTS ARE YOU WORKING ON THESE DAYS?” an acquaintance asked.
“I’m helping Naomi compile a book on shyness,” I said.
“What? You’re not shy.”
“Oh, but I am.”
She looked at me, waited a beat. Laughed.
I felt hurt, but not surprised, as I had received a similar reaction many times throughout my life. But what is the face of shyness? Does anyone know? I am the kind of shy that does not necessarily show in the face.
To complicate matters, although the shy side dominates, I also have a strong and well-developed not-shy side. Sometimes nothing can stop me from approaching, talking to, laughing with other people. I do plenty of readings, speaking engagements, and so forth. All the more reason that, when my shyness begins to take over, I am often not believed.
A shy/not-shy human is a frequently misunderstood one.
I can’t predict when I’ll move from shy to not-shy. The switch can occur without warning, and when it does, I may find myself in a fix.
That’s what happened some years ago, when I had a job with a public relations side, involving occasional travel. On one trip, I represented my company at a conference. I found the first two days productive and enjoyable, as, in not-shy mode, I interacted comfortably with people, handed out and collected business cards and generally did my company proud. The others attending the conference were either existing clients or prospective clients of my company. On the third and final day, my company was scheduled to host a five o’clock reception featuring the biggest inducement at any gathering of adults in the so-called developed world: an open bar. My bosses back home counted on high attendance and budgeted a lot of money for that reception. As the face of the company, I was expected to work the room thoroughly and non-stop until the departure of the last guest.
At a little after four o’clock, I began to sense myself moving into shy mode. Suddenly I felt apart, unto myself, disconnected from anyone else. The idea of being around other people, of having to perform socially, threw me into a state of terror. I was sure I would not be able to do what was required of me.
So I retreated to my hotel room and sat still, willing myself to transform back into not-shy mode in time for the reception. With all my heart, I did not want to go.
I did go; it was my duty. But I could not pull out of shy mode the whole time. It would prob
ably have been better for my company if I had stayed away and given the evening to reading. I cowered in corners, made frequent and lengthy escapes to the washroom, and talked to nobody, not even people I already knew. I was so paralyzed with shyness I could barely raise my head. All I could think of was flight, escape, the need to be alone. At that reception my company had no human face.
That night I felt heavy, weighed down with awkwardness and the knowledge of social and professional failure. Yet mere hours earlier, I had experienced a sense of lightness, good humour, easy fellowship with the many other people at the conference.
The flipping between not-shy and shy has been going on in me as long as I can remember. Perhaps because I had a shy father and a not-shy mother. Is there a genetic component to shy/not-shy? Or do we find a place on the shy/not-shy spectrum through socialization? I wonder if it even makes sense to characterize shy/not-shy as another of those heredity-versus-environment mysteries. Maybe nature and nurture both contribute. Maybe certain behaviours, reflecting either shy or not-shy, are reinforced by our parents, while other behaviours reflecting the opposite are squelched, so that we wind up at least appearing shy or not-shy most of the time. Or maybe the origins of our ways of moving through the world don’t matter, and we should just concentrate on self-acceptance.
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