When I was a little girl, school was the centre of my social life, such as it was, and my favourite place. I loved the structured academic day, the reassuring routines, the lessons themselves, the half-pint bottles of milk for sale at recess. School also gave me opportunities to display my not-shy capabilities. In grade four, we had Afternoon Classics, a learning program that consisted of the teacher’s reading the class entire great books in twenty-minute segments at the end of each school day. Miss Pearson, a halting oral reader, struggled valiantly through a couple of chapters of Mark Twain, but realized from all the fidgeting in the classroom that she could not hold her audience. One day after school, she took me aside and asked if I would mind reading in her place during Afternoon Classics. (Oral Reading was a subject, so Miss Pearson knew how every student sounded.) I was in heaven. I’ve always been a passionate oral reader, and my classmates did listen intently. It brought me such delight, such a sense of belonging, to bring them pleasure. Their silence allowed me to make subtle adjustments in volume and pace as needed. We got through Tom Sawyer; The Wind in the Willows; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Not-shy-I performed well, delivered great literature to my classmates, and helped a good teacher out in the process. Does it get better than that?
Yet when awards day arrived, and all I was required to do was walk to the front of the school gym to receive a certificate, shy-I shook in my seat, was barely able to get up when my name was called, and had to let jelly legs carry me to my destination. As the adult in charge handed me my prize, I struggled to get out a simple word of thanks.
For me, shyness has always been enmeshed with anxiety. In adolescence and early adulthood I did a lot of acting. I liked growing into my part, rehearsing, hanging out with other theatre types. Getting out in front of an audience, however, was a problem. Before each performance, I was overcome with bashfulness and apprehension, which manifested physically in a maddeningly itchy chest rash, abdominal pain, and, sometimes, shaky legs. My father wisely suggested I hold back a little, to save myself. I did not know how to hold back. A director tried to reassure me by pointing out that Olivier also suffered from crippling stage fright. That was an interesting piece of intelligence, but it did not help me.
Once I had the lead role in a play. Minutes before curtain time on opening night, I announced to the director that I would not be able to go on. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I can’t. I just can’t.”
“Rona,” she said, “I did not give you this part because you can’t do it, but because you can.”
And I did. But it was tough.
At a certain point I had to decide whether to pursue a professional acting career. I was tempted to try and follow the pro route. The work fascinated me and fulfilled me creatively; the theatre environment and the people it attracted made me happy; and I had received plenty of encouragement from directors and critics. Still, I had to ask myself this question: Am I willing to go through a lifetime of pre-performance introversion and visceral terror? In the end, I could not bear the idea of living in such reliably recurring fear. So I quit. True, Olivier stuck it out. Good for Olivier.
Here’s one thing I have slowly come to understand, after years of trying to master or mask shyness: when I am in shy mode, so be it. I don’t have to master, mask, or fight shy-me. I can allow myself to be one rather than splitting into two parts: shy-me and fighting-shy-me. It is liberating not to struggle to be something that, at shy moments, I simply am not.
So, if I find myself moving into shy mode at a social event, I may retreat from whatever group I happen to be part of, and instead converse one-to-one with someone I know well. Or I may offer to help the host by setting out food, washing dishes, retrieving a case of beer from the basement fridge. Doing a task helps me stay healthy when I’m shy. I may leave the scene for a few minutes for a walk around the block. I may simply thank my hosts for a lovely time and leave. I have options.
I think we tend to assume that not-shy is a preferable state to shy. Not for me, now that I accept my shy/not-shy nature. True, in not-shy mode I find it easier to make a necessary business call to someone I don’t know well or have never met. In not-shy mode I navigate my way through life less laboriously. But in shy mode, I am more acutely aware of other people’s feelings, more observant, more attuned to my environment. There is much to be said for shy mode. In not-shy mode, it’s party time. I miss a lot of what is going on around me in terms of other people’s experience.
In recent years I have finally come to understand that shy mode deserves as much respect as not-shy mode, and I have restructured my life so that, for hours on end, I do not need to interact with more than one person. Then, when I am out and about, I can enjoy other people properly.
So far I’ve had no complaints from others. And more importantly, I am at peace with myself.
Insecurity
MICHELINE MAYLOR
Oh, my little pedigree of reading in the can!
Slim and dim at dinner parties
heeled by the beautiful and interesting.
What can be done to glamour up
a witty quip in the starshine
of all these teeth?
How to be shy
KERRY RYAN
HOW TO BE SHY: THE HUG
Receive only, never initiate
Recognize the signs:
a trespasser entering your body’s atmosphere,
arms gaping like a B-movie vampire
Hesitate,
be certain you are the target
Hesitate again,
ensure maximum awkwardness
Miscalculate the landing of limbs,
hastily rearrange
Realize your breasts are a thrust jumble,
that you’re gripping a coil of fat
in a way that might imply judgement
Let panic escape through your face
as it perches on his or her shoulder
Be alert to variations:
palm corroding your back,
lips rasping the west side of your face
Allow a small sound,
that of a trapped animal, to escape
Pretend this hasn’t happened
Count to one (silently), release
Hold the relief inside your lungs
until you’ve retreated a safe distance
HOW TO BE SHY: SMALL TALK
Let everything you know
about this person drain like a sewer
hungry for thunderstorm
Open your mouth
Wait
Close your mouth
Stare at his or her chin
until a self-conscious hand
is lifted to hide it
If you are in Winnipeg,
pose an inane question
to which you know the answer:
snow
Repeat:
mosquitoes
Ask about pets or lovers,
then offer condolences
Wonder why you’re suddenly
using hand gestures,
why you’re laughing
Suspect that words may not be leaving
your mouth in the correct order
Hope so fervently
for the light to change,
line to move, movie to start
For a fire alarm, flash flood, heart attack,
that it shows
in the flushed clench of your face
HOW TO BE SHY: INTRODUCTIONS
If a foreign hand flashes open,
remove your damp palm from its pocket,
(dislodging shredded tissue)
allow it to be shaken
Forget the face even as you look at it
Let his or her name bounce
off your forehead
Speak your own too softly
Repeat it, step closer,
repeat it, step closer
Later, when you’re called
by a name one degree from correct,
consider changing
HOW TO BE SHY: PARTIES
Stand next to the chips,
never move
Gaze thoughtfully
into the middle distance,
as if heartily amused
by the doorways and tunnels
of your own mind
Eavesdrop on conversations
roiling around you,
smile at the apropos comments
you choose to swallow whole
Practise invisibility
Drink your wine too fast
And the next glass
Select a book, skim the jacket,
nod knowingly
Work your way through each shelf,
ditto the CDS
Seize the first person
who speaks a word to you,
latch on like a long-lost friend, a twin
from whom you were separated at birth
Shybrightly
SHAWNA LEMAY
IN THE YEARS between high school and university, those years in which I learned to breathe thinly and sharp, I somehow summoned the courage to take an evening class. It doesn’t matter what the subject was, the ruins of Rome, a brief history of God, the Etruscans, or the Unicorn in art and literature, it doesn’t matter. At the break, after student introductions and the terrifying intricacies of the course outline, a woman from the class came up to me in the lavatory, and said to me out of the ghastly greenish-yellow haze of the mirror, there’s help for people like you.
Not everyone believes shyness needs to be cured. In his auto-biography, Gandhi devotes a chapter to shyness. For him, shyness was an advantage, a boon. He says:
Beyond occasionally exposing me to laughter, my constitutional shyness has been no disadvantage whatsoever….Its greater benefit has been that it has taught me the economy of words.…a thoughtless word hardly ever escapes my tongue or pen….Proneness to exaggerate, to suppress or modify the truth, wittingly or unwittingly, is a natural weakness of man and silence is necessary in order to surmount it….My shyness has been in reality my shield and buckler. It has allowed me to grow. It has helped me in my discernment of truth.
Thoughtless words, words that have escaped my tongue, are a plague to me, horrible blisters. The trouble being that when I am called upon to speak, there is a darkness that envelops me, a cloud that descends and takes me in its unappeasable woolly arms. But I don’t worry, since I know there is help for people for me.
In fact, I’ve never thought of seeking help. Shyness, I must have known all along, is my shield and buckler. Not everyone is so adorned.
Breathe consciously, is one bit of advice I came across recently when I looked up “shyness” on the web. Good advice, I think. Very good. The affliction of shyness, says one particular web site, causes one to “stop breathing, freeze, and attempt to become invisible when afraid.” I had never thought that my lifelong preoccupation with learning to become invisible was an unwanted side-effect but, rather, the potential gift of shyness. If only I could become more shy, then perhaps, at last, I could learn to become invisible. I can say, however, from quite a bit of experience, that not breathing, at least not this alone, does not do the trick.
When I was in grade three, the doctor said that I had an S curve developing in my spine, and also that my lungs were undersized. He recommended exercise, swimming, and cycling. Apparently walking with the red wagon to the library, filling it with books, and walking back and settling into the orange fake leather chair that could be spun to face the corner of the room, my body a perfect and nearly invisible “S,” was not sufficient. For my birthday that year in May, I was given a state-of-the-art bike, also orange, for some unknown reason, and it’s only now that I notice this coincidental detail. That spring my parents decided to build a pool at the cabin. There would be no running water or plumbing in the house (we were learning to rough it, after all), but we would have a swimming pool. A friend with a Bobcat came and dug the hole, and then the rest was done by hand. I ignored the technical difficulties, the mixing and pouring of cement-like substances, the installation of skimmer and heater and whatnot. What I was transfixed by was the excavated pile of dirt and muck laden with rocks and other odd bits from eight feet below. I washed, sorted, and boxed. No one bothered me, which seemed to me remarkable. They looked at me, I thought then, as if I was spellbound, other. There were two worlds, one busy and full of laughter and intense discussion of myriad technicalities, and the other mine, slow and fine, silent, and strewn with new-discovered jewels. Two worlds, separated by a cellophane membrane, a curtain. Now, the mother of a five-and-a-half-year-old, I understand that one never interrupts a busy child with even so much as a smiling glance. The membrane is all too permeable.
All that summer, I breathed evenly through my runt lungs. I learned also how to swim that summer, never having managed anything other than a frantic dog paddle until then. My mom taught me the front crawl, the intermittent breathing, the perfect deep breaths in between strokes. But my favourite was swimming to the bottom and holding my breath there as long as possible, eyes closed, disappearing from the surface, unmoored and yet held, held in the glorious invisible freedom of the depths.
To swim, to become fluid, in this place that had been so recently solid earth, was an odd sensation. I’m not sure what to do with it, but I can almost conjure it for myself, this sensation. This breathless, held, dark knowing of the absence and the presence and the fluidity of the depths.
There is a kind of shyness into which fear and humiliation cannot enter. I know this first from the summers of my childhood where I slipped away into the forest, horses following. I would try to lose myself, in myself and in the forest. I went shyly through the trees, to the trees. For shyness, too, is a stance, a way of being—silent, seeing, reserved, a little off-kilter. Shyness is an approach, it might be said, just like any other approach.
“Speaking,” says Fernando Pessoa, “is the easiest way of becoming unknown.” One of the contradictions of shyness is that I want to be known and, at the same time, invisible. Speaking undoes me, it removes me from the mysterious core of being. Speaking, I am not myself, and therefore cannot be known. But then, it’s true that we are not just one self. When I speak, I am my own stunt double, mouthing words that I imagine will be dubbed in properly by the real me in the editing stages.
When I began writing poetry, I came across the story of how the poet Gwendolyn MacEwen would at times become physically ill before a reading. By all accounts she was a mesmerizing reader, sultry and mysterious. For no good reason, I have always illogically connected MacEwen with Emily Dickinson. Archibald MacLeish says that “there is nothing more paradoxical in the whole history of poetry, to my way of thinking, than Emily Dickinson’s commitment of the live voice to a private box full of pages and snippets tied together with little loops of thread.” To me, it’s sane behaviour. I have at all times reserved in my closet a box full of bits of thread and ribbon and twine.
In my undergraduate years, I was sure to take classes that wouldn’t require any oral presentations. When one popped up on a syllabus, I dropped the class. For one required class, there was no backing out. The paper shook, I turned red. I’m sure it was a nerve-wracking sight to watch, and I’m filled with pity for those who had to endure it.
I almost fainted in the bathroom at the Café Soleil the night of my first poetry reading, which was with several other readers. I have a distinct memory of the wood grain of the rough floorboards in that café. I remember that the doors to the loo required a great deal of jostling to open and close, and that I thought I might be trapped there when my name was called. But I did make good my escape, and I did read, and afterwards I went home and tied up the rumpled, sweated-upon pages with bits of twine.
Later, I joked with a friend about a performance poem that I developed, titled Red. If all else failed at a reading, this would most likely succeed.
Flash forward several years. I’m at the Old Vic on the University of
Toronto campus, reading, along with three other poets, to a packed house, people standing up at the back. I’m the third reader. The only thing I remember about the first two—Sonnet L’Abbé and Lorna Goodison—is that they are impossibly good, dramatic, poised and confident. I’m breathing. Raggedly. Consciously ragged. Stunned by fear. My one thought, what a blessed life I’ve led; this is as afraid as I’ve ever been.
What does it mean to always be attending to breathing? What truth resides in these shallow breaths, the wild and tumultuous, and the gorgeous sweeping ones?
My name is called, I rise, I’m on the stage, this small book I wrote in my hand. I’m there with my shield and buckler. The light from the television camera is on my face, warm, golden, pale. I read, serene, calm. It’s the stunt double, of course. But it’s done. The next reader, George Murray, begins with an air guitar performance. I’m envious. But my stunt double only plays the typewriter.
Afterwards I try to remember. Did I breathe? I have no recollection. It was like being underwater, that is all.
Last summer I wrote a poem in which I quote Baudelaire. He says, “Anything that falls short of the sublime is reprehensible.” I know this to be true. And I sorrow before the requisite temptation to believe otherwise. My poem goes on from there and ends with awe at all that falls short. I don’t mind bringing up this poem, because since then it’s been haphazardly folded, loosely bound, and it now languishes in a size nine-and-a-half shoebox. This is all quite romantic sounding, though it’s really not meant to be.
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